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Cloud Or Not?
There is a lot of buzz about cloud computing. Recently, this has spilled over into the HPC world. There are private and public clouds. And private clouds at external organization or internal to your own organization. I do not have the gist of it down yet, but this page explores the option: can or should we consider HPC cloud instead of spending our $298K NSF award on cloud computing or stay the course.
About Us
First we need to assess our usage of our clusters and if the cloud can support that. We also need to stress that we are small liberal arts college, primarily undergraduate, with less than 3,000 students and perhaps 450 active faculty. We do not need to do cloud computing because were going to scale upwards to 10,000 nodes. We also have a relatively small cluster user base, representing many different interests groups as opposed to one large community using a small set of tools. Examples:
- Some users run hundreds and hundreds of serial jobs, which require a month or so to run, but only need 100 MB of memory or so and do everything in memory with their own checkpointing.
- Some users run hundreds and hundreds of serial jobs, which require modest amount of memory, run overnight, and whose output becomes input for a single matlab job that runs for weeks.
- Some users run tens and tens of jobs in serial fashion with modest IO requirements.
- Some users run LAMMPS parallel over the ethernet switches.
- Some users run Amber parallel jobs which run for weeks to month using the Infiniband interconnect.
- Some users run Gaussian with large IO activity and need local fast disk space.
