Video: The Marriage of Cloud, HPC and Containers

Adam Huffman from the Francis Crick Institute gave this talk at FOSDEM’17. “We will present experiences of supporting HPC/HTC workloads on private cloud resources, with ideas for how to do this better and description of trends for non-traditionalHPC resource provision. I will discuss my work as part of the Operations Team for the eMedLab private cloud, which is a large-scale (6000-core, 5PB)biomedical research cloud using HPC hardware, aiming to support HPC workloads.”

The Long Rise of HPC in the Cloud

“As the cloud market has matured, we have begun to see the introduction of HPC cloud providers and even the large public cloud providers such as Microsoft are introducing genuine HPC technology to the cloud. This change opens up the possibility for new users that wish to either augment their current computing capabilities or take the initial plunge and try HPC technology without investing huge sums of money on an internal HPC infrastructure.”

OCF Staffs Up Largest HPC Delivery Team in the UK

OCF in the UK reports that the company continues to expand its operations. The high performance computing integrator is recruiting a number of new staff to meet the growing appetite and demand for HPC and data analytics solutions across universities, research institutes and commercial businesses in the UK.

Reducing the Time to Science with Efficient Clouds

In this special guest feature from Scientific Computing World, Dr Bruno Silva from The Francis Crick Institute in London writes that new cloud technologies will make the cloud even more important to scientific computing. “The emergence of public cloud and the ability to cloud-burst is actually the real game-changer. Because of its ‘infinite’ amount of resources (effectively always under-utilized), it allows for a clear decoupling of time-to-science from efficiency. One can be somewhat less efficient in a controlled fashion (higher cost, slightly more waste) to minimize time-to-science when required (in burst, so to speak) by effectively growing the computing estate available beyond the fixed footprint of local infrastructure – this is often referred to as the hybrid cloud model. You get both the benefit of efficient infrastructure use, and the ability to go beyond that when strictly required.”

Will the Cloud Change Scientific Computing?

“What is important to researchers is ‘time to science,’ not the length of time a job takes to compute. ‘If you can wait in line at a national supercomputing center and it takes five days in the queue for your job to run, and then you get 50,000 cores and your job runs in a few hours, that’s great. But what if you could get those 50,000 cores right now, no waiting, and your job takes longer to run but it would still finish before your other job would start on the big iron machine.”