In this video from the HPC User Forum in Detroit, Bob Hood from InuTeq presents: Suitability of Commercial Clouds for NASA’s HPC Applications.
NASA’s High-End Computing Capability Project is periodically asked if it could be more cost effective through the use of commercial cloud resources. To answer the question, HECC’s Application Performance and Productivity team undertook a performance and cost evaluation comparing three domains: two commercial cloud providers, Amazon and Penguin, and HECC’s in-house resources—the Pleiades and Electra systems.
In the study, the APP team used a combination of the NAS Parallel Benchmarks and six full applications from NASA’s workload on Pleiades and Electra to compare performance of nodes based on three different generations of Intel Xeon processors—Haswell, Broadwell, and Skylake. Because of export control limitations, the most heavily used applications on Pleiades and Electra could not be used in the cloud; therefore, only one of the applications, OpenFOAM, represents work from the Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate and the Human and Exploration Mission Directorate. The other five applications are from the Science Mission Directorate.
Bob Hood is Technical Manager at InuTeq-ASRC Federal. After completing his Ph.D., Robert Hood joined the faculty of Rice University. He participated in the Rn and ParaScope research programs, concentrating on debugging issues. After ten years on the Rice faculty, he took a position with Kubota Pacific Computer in 1992, serving for a time as the director of the languages group. In 1993 he joined the contract staff of the Numerical Aerodynamic Simulation (NAS) division at the NASA Ames Research Center and has been there since. Robert Hood’s professional interests are in high performance computing systems, including benchmarking, programming tools, and advanced compilation systems. He led the effort to design and build p2d2, a portable, scalable debugger. In addition, he served on the steering committee of the Parallel Tools Consortium and was active in the High Performance Debugger Forum, which sought to standardize aspects of debuggers available on HPC platforms.
