Towards an Execution Model for HPC Clouds

Abstract

The application of emergent Clouds to the domain of high performance computing is considered by examining the various operational modalities comprising the field of supercomputing and by analyzing their suitability to Clouds based on underlying factors of performance degradation. It is found that while throughput computing may be readily supported for such HPC workflows as parameter sweeps, capability computing and even weak scaled “cooperative” computing may not be well served using conventional practices. But the possible advance of revolutionary methods to manage asynchrony, exploit message-driven computing techniques and declarative synchronization semantic constructs such as found in the experimental ParalleX execution model may provide an alternative paradigm for bringing Clouds more closely aligned to Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) applications. Experimental results capturing an Adaptive Mesh Refinement (AMR) application in numerical relativity u sing the ParalleX-based HPX-3 runtime system demonstrates many of the required properties for HPC Clouds.