We have a similar service intended especially for colocating the datacenters of Polytechnics and Universities in our datacenter in the north of Finland. http://www.slideshare.net/PeterJenkins1/csc-modular-datacenter
In addition we have been operating an HPC-oriented IaaS-cloud, carved off our production cluster for over a year now (https://research.csc.fi/cloud-computing). One thing that’s under active development is a virtual cluster toolchain and front-end which could fairly easily be utilized by other sites as well: https://github.com/CSC-IT-Center-for-Science/pouta-blueprints Recently there’s been a growing demand for private cloud for internal projects and even from other public institutions. They present a possibility that the service may evolve to become a more general-purpose cloud platform that also supports HPC workloads. The marginal cost of this is fairly reasonable as much of the heavy lifting is in the cloud middleware development/integration that needs to be done anyway and adding different types of nodes/flavours is pretty trivial. This trend presents an interesting prospect for HPC centers in general: I’m willing to bet that in many places around the globe there is a niche for a vendor-independent, non-profit, regional, government-backed cloud service for critical public-sector workloads. HPC centers are be a good fit for providing this as many are already developing their own cloud services, procure and manage large quantities of scale-out hardware and have typically a very trustworthy reputation (and possibly certifications). Perhaps in the future the circle will close and we'll see some HPC centers become again providers of mission-critical general-puropse centralized computing resources in addition to HPC. :) O-P -- Olli-Pekka Lehto Development Manager, Computing Platforms CSC - IT Center for Science Ltd. E-Mail: [email protected] // Tel: +358 50 381 8604 // skype: oplehto // twitter: @ople On 10 May 2015, at 21:47, John Hearns <[email protected]> wrote: > This article might be interesting: > > http://www.information-age.com/technology/data-centre-and-it-infrastructure/123459441/inside-uks-first-collaborative-data-centre > > As it says 'Data-centre-as-a-service' > A shared data centre, outside the centre of the city, used by several > research inistitutes and universities. > I have been involved in preparing bids for equipment there, including the > innovative eMedlab project. > > Central London has its own problems in getting enough space and power for > large computing setups, and this makes a lot of sense. > > > > > > On 8 May 2015 at 20:58, Dimitris Zilaskos <[email protected]> wrote: > 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 > > > _______________________________________________ > 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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