Hi, IBM Platform does provide IB for HPC with bare metal and cloudbursting, among other HPC services on the cloud. Detailed information including benchmarks can be found at http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/platformcomputing/products/cloudservice/ . Note that I work for IBM so I am obviously biased.
Best regards, Dimitris On Fri, May 8, 2015 at 2:40 PM, Prentice Bisbal <[email protected] > wrote: > Mike, > > What are the characteristics of your cluster workloads? Are they tightly > coupled jobs, or are they embarassingly parallel or serial jobs? I find it > hard to believe that a virtualized, ethernet shared network infrastructure > can compete with FDR IB for performance on tightly coupled jobs. AWS HPC > representatives came to my school to give a presentation on their > offerings, and even they admitted as much. > > If your workloads are communication intensive, I'd think harder about > using the cloud, or find a cloud provider that provides IB for HPC (there > are a few that do, but I can't remember their names). If your workloads > are loosely-coupled jobs or many serial jobs, AWS or similar might be fine. > AWS does not provide IB, and in fact shares very little information about > their network architecture, making it had to compare to other offerings > without actually running benchmarks. > > If your users primarily interact with the cluster through command-line > logins, using the cloud shouldn't be noticeably different the hostname(s) > they have to SSH to will be different, and moving data in an out might be > different, but compiling and submitting jobs should be the same if you make > the same tools available in the cloud that you have on your local clusters. > > Prentice > > > > > On 05/07/2015 06:28 PM, Hutcheson, Mike wrote: > >> Hi. We are working on refreshing the centralized HPC cluster resources >> that our university researchers use. I have been asked by our >> administration to look into HPC in the cloud offerings as a possibility to >> purchasing or running a cluster on-site. >> >> We currently run a 173-node, CentOS-based cluster with ~120TB (soon to >> increase to 300+TB) in our datacenter. It¹s a standard cluster >> configuration: IB network, distributed file system (BeeGFS. I really >> like it), Torque/Maui batch. Our users run a varied workload, from >> fine-grained, MPI-based parallel aps scaling to 100s of cores to >> coarse-grained, high-throughput jobs (We¹re a CMS Tier-3 site) with high >> I/O requirements. >> >> Whatever we transition to, whether it be a new in-house cluster or >> something ³out there², I want to minimize the amount of change or learning >> curve our users would have to experience. They should be able to focus on >> their research and not have to spend a lot of their time learning a new >> system or trying to spin one up each time they have a job to run. >> >> If you have worked with HPC in the cloud, either as an admin and/or >> someone who has used cloud resources for research computing purposes, I >> would appreciate learning your experience. >> >> Even if you haven¹t used the cloud for HPC computing, please feel free to >> share your thoughts or concerns on the matter. >> >> Sort of along those same lines, what are your thoughts about leasing a >> cluster and running it on-site? >> >> Thanks for your time, >> >> Mike Hutcheson >> Assistant Director of Academic and Research Computing Services >> Baylor University >> >> >> _______________________________________________ >> Beowulf mailing list, [email protected] sponsored by Penguin Computing >> To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit >> http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf >> > > _______________________________________________ > Beowulf mailing list, [email protected] sponsored by Penguin Computing > To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit > http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf >
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