2013 has been an exciting year for the field of Statistics and Big Data, with the release of the new R version 3.0.0. We discuss a few topics in this area, providing toy examples and supporting code for configuring and using Amazon’s EC2 Computing Cloud. There are other ways to get the job done, of course. But we found it helpful to build the infrastructure on Amazon from scratch, and hope others might find it useful, too.
Cloud Guide for HPC Computing
This white paper presents an evolutionary approach to cloud computing within a high-performance computing (HPC) context. The paper addresses the seamless and incremental process of moving from private/internal to public/external clouds, the realistic use cases, and the qualities needed in a vendor to get you there. This paper also compares several public cloud offerings and profiles a vendor who is enabling a range of cloud solutions for leading Fortune 500 companies.
Best-in-Class HPC Cloud Solutions
This white paper reviews common HPC-environment challenges and outlines solutions that can help IT professionals deliver best-in-class HPC cloud solutions—without undue stress and organizational chaos.
Cloud Computing Guide
IT organizations are facing increasing pressure to deliver critical services to their users while their budgets are either reduced or maintained at current levels. New technologies have the potential to deliver industry-changing information to users who need data in real time, but only if the IT infrastructure is designed and implemented to do so. While computing power continues to decline in cost, the management of large data centers, together with the associated costs of running these data centers, increases. The server administration over the life of the computer asset will consume about 75 percent of the total cost.
Cloud Solutions for HPC Efficiency
This white paper reviews common HPC-environment challenges and outlines solutions that can help IT professionals deliver best-in-class HPC cloud solutions—without undue stress and organizational chaos.
Cloud Adoption in Your Community
In conference rooms worldwide, enterprise IT departments are evaluating entry into ‘the cloud’. Armed with media reports and marketing materials, they are considering questions like, “Is the cloud appropriate for critical workloads? Will the cloud really save time and money? Does the cloud pose a security risk?”
There’s only one problem with such due diligence: there’s no such thing as ‘the cloud’. Instead, there are multiple clouds, with different configurations, offered by different providers and representing different degrees of benefit and risk.
Virtualization, the Cloud and HPC
Hardware virtualization refers to the creation of a number of self-contained virtual servers that are resident on the physical server, or host machine. This allows multiple applications to be run on the same machine while providing security and fault isolation. Typically an administrator decides how much of each resource — CPU, memory, net- working — to allocate to the virtual machine (VM), while assigning priorities to different classes of users. The virtual infrastructure dynamically enforces these policies to ensure that each VM gets its fair share of resources.
IBM Cloud Computing Performance
High-performance computing (HPC), technical applications and analytics place heavy demands on cloud computing resources. To meet these demands, IBM cloud offerings include dedicated, bare-metal servers that provide the raw horsepower and security of a non-virtualized environment, as well as private hypervisor- based virtual machines for increased economy and optimized price-performance.
HPC Cloud with IBM Platform Computing
The IBM® Platform ComputingTM(ii) portfolio has been driving the evolution of distributed computing and the HPC Cloud for over 20 years. Ground-breaking products such as IBM® PlatformTM LSF® were among the first to enable companies to manage distributed environments from modest clusters to massive compute farms with tens of thousands of processors handling thousands of jobs. Most recently the introduction of IBM® PlatformTM Dynamic Cluster, together with IBM® PlatformTM Cluster Manager – Advanced Edition, permits turning LSF environments into a dynamic HPC cloud.
Lustre Software for Intel Cloud
Even the largest HPC clusters can experience degradation due to poor I/O performance. This occurs as massive amounts of data and increasingly large individual files combine limited disk drive hardware capacity to cause significant bottlenecks. Lustre is an open source parallel file system that improves the overall scalability and performance of HPC clusters. It provides cluster client nodes with shared access to file system data in parallel, greatly increasing throughout and performance. Lustre is the most widely used HPC storage system in the world-with parallel storage capabilities utilized by over 50% of HPC deployments-and can scale to tens of thousands of clients.
