A study of cloud computing environments for High Performance applications

Abstract

High performance applications requires high processing power to compute highly intensive and complex applications for research, engineering, medical and academic projects. In the traditional way, an organization will have to pay very high costs to run an HPC (High Performance computing) application. The organization has to purchase highly expensive hardware for running an HPC application and maintaining it afterwards. The HPC resources on the company premises may not satisfy all the demands of scientific application where resources may not suitable for corresponding requirements. Considering the case of SMEs (small and medium enterprises), an increasing demand is always challenging. Cloud computing is an on-demand, pay-as-you-go-model, that offers scalable computing resources, unlimited storage in an instantly available way. In this paper we included requirements of HPC applications in cloud, cluster based HPC applications, types of clusters, Google's HPC Cloud architecture, performance analysis of various HPC cloud vendors and four case studies of HPC applications in cloud.