Although the discussion took place several months ago, we wanted to point you in the direction of one of the more interesting discussions presented at last year’s ISC Cloud event in Frankfurt, Germany.
At the event, which by the way is happening again this year, Josh Simons who heads VMware’s relatively new HPC cloud push presented one of the best arguments for HPC clouds while taking a necessarily realistic approach to some of its limitations.
As Simons describes in his abstract for the talk, which was just posted in full video format at VMware’s “Communities” page:
“Virtualization is the enabling substrate for Cloud computing. As such, it brings an array of benefits and challenges to the concept of clouds for HPC from both a manageability and performance perspective. From this talk, participants will gain a good understanding of the current state of performance for virtualized HPC applications as well as the prospects for further future performance improvements over the next few years. In addition, the primary value propositions for virtualization in HPC will be covered from the perspective of both cloud users and cloud providers, including dynamic resource management and application resilience.”
The video of Simons speaking on the topic of high performance computing in the cloud is one of the better ways we can think of to spend a free 30 minutes. While the discussion was presented last year, nearly all of the benefits and hurdles are still perfectly pertinent—if not in some ways more pronounced.