Facilitating HPC Operation and Administration via Cloud

Abstract

Experiencing a tremendous growth, Cloud Computing offers a number of advantages over other distributed platforms. Introducing the advantages of High Performance Computing (HPC) also brought forward the development of HPCaaS (HPC as a Service), which has mainly focused on flexible access to resources, cost-effectiveness, and the no-maintenance-needed for end-users. Besides providing and using HPCaaS, HPC centers could leverage more from Cloud Computing technology, for instance to facilitate operation and administration of deployed HPC systems, commonly faced by most supercomputer centers. This paper reports the product, EasyOP, developed to realize the idea that one or more Cloud or HPC facilities can be run over a centralized and unified control platform. The main purpose of EasyOP is that the information of HPC systems hardware and system software, failure alarms, jobs scheduling, etc. is sent to the Wuxi cloud computing center. After a series of analysis and processing, we are able to share many valuable data, including alarm and job scheduling status, to HPC users through SMS, email, and WeChat. More importantly, with the data accumulated on the cloud computing center, EasyOP can offer several easy-to-use functions, such as user(s) management, monthly/yearly reports, one-screen monitoring and so on. By the end of 2016, EasyOP successfully served more than 50 HPC systems with almost 10000 nodes and over of 300 regular users.