Software Defined Data Center

The software defined data center is the underlying data center architecture that allows most IT infrastructure to be defined in software and to function as enterprise-wide resources. This approach enables ITaaS to be delivered in a virtualized environment with greater agility, speed and quality of service.

Video: Virtualized HPC as a Service

“The HPC community has had a long-standing interest in creating scale-out environments for running throughput-oriented and parallel distributed workloads. Both large-scale environments (for example, cloud computing facilities) and scale-out workloads (such as Big Data) are becoming more important in the enterprise. In fact, with the rise of Big Data, the advent of affordable, powerful clusters, and strategies that take advantage of commodity systems for scale-out applications, these days the enterprise computing environment is looking a lot like HPC.”

HPC Virtualization and Workload Agility

Virtualization allows workloads to be compartmentalized in their own VM in order to take full advantage of the underlying parallelism of today’s multicore, heterogeneous HPC systems without compromising security. This approach is particularly beneficial for organizations centralizing multiple groups on to a shared cluster or for teams with security issues – for example, a life sciences environment where access to genomic data needs to be restricted to specific researchers.

Virtualized High Performance Computing with Mellanox FDR and RoCE

“The HPC community can realize significant benefits from adopting enterprise-capable IT solutions grounded in proven virtualization and cloud technology. And conversely, as business IT environments become increasingly compute-intensive, lessons learned by the scientists and engineers working with HPC can be transferred to their counterparts in the enterprise. It’s a win-win situation.”

HPC Virtualization and Secure Private Cloud

This article is the third in an editorial series that explores the benefits the HPC community can achieve by adopting HPC virtualization and secure private cloud technologies. Virtualization has been proven to be a viable architectural approach that addresses the many challenges mentioned in last week’s article. This week and next we look at the benefits of creating a virtualized infrastructure.

Challenges on the Road to HPC Virtualization

Although both the enterprise and HPC can benefit from virtualization, the two have had dissimilar requirements. This article is the second in an editorial series that explores the benefits the HPC community can achieve by adopting HPC virtualization and cloud technologies.

Ben Golub on How Docker will Change the Datacenter

“Until Docker came around some people used containers but the use was very much restricted to large organizations, like Google, that had specialized teams and training. But the containers weren’t portable between different environments. With Docker we’ve made containers easy for everybody to use; we’ve made them portable between environments; we made them exceptionally lightweight and we built up a huge ecosystem around that.”

insideHPC Guide to Virtualization, Cloud and HPC

Over the past several years, virtualization has made major inroads into enterprise IT infrastructures. And now it is moving into the realm of high performance computing (HPC), especially for such compute intensive applications as electronic design automation (EDA), life sciences, financial services and digital media entertainment. This article is the first in a series that explores the benefits the HPC community can achieve by adopting proven virtualization and cloud technologies.

Video: EULER – Different Levels of Virtualization on an HPC-Cluster

In this video from the Forum on Cloud Computing and Virtualization for HPC, Christian Bolliger from ETH Zurich presents: EULER – Different Levels of Virtualization on an HPC-Cluster.

Why Implement Virtual Machines in HPC?

Over at the OH Tech Blog, Kevin Wohlever writes that financial savings derived from virtualization come by way of improved processes, enhanced services, and increased staff productivity. Basically, if the systems staff is focused on providing more and better services instead of always fixing problems with existing services, the productivity will improve overall.