The topic of energy efficiency is stepping further to the forefront as overall computational power grows, continuously raising the necessary energy required to run those computations. The subject is particularly topical today, as this year’s International Supercomputing conference kicked off with the release of the new Top500. With supercomputing conferences comes the discussion of exascale computing and what sort of energy and power requirements it will necessitate.
With that in mind, Datapipe hopes to establish themselves as a green-savvy HPC cloud provider with their recently announced Stratosphere platform. Datapipe markets Stratosphere as a green HPC cloud service and in doing so partnering with Verne Global and their Icelandic datacenter, which is known for its propensity in green computing.
One of the benefits to setting up in Iceland, as discussed in a Green Computing Report article, is the ability to reach out to institutions in both North America and Europe.
“The network capabilities of Verne Global’s data center and efficiencies of Iceland’s energy infrastructure enable Datapipe to provide a one-of-a-kind green HPC cloud solution,” said Robb Allen, CEO of Datapipe. “Datapipe clients now have access to Stratosphere’s Iceland region through the same portal used to deploy cloud solutions in the U.S., U.K. and Asia.”
While virtualized systems in data centers like the one in Iceland do not generally enter Top500 or exascale discussions, they will figure into the long term problem of running HPC clouds in an energy efficient manner.
“Power availability and costs are becoming two of the leading constraints for HPC clouds and clusters,” said Verne Global CEO Jeff Monroe on the impact of energy efficiency, or the lack thereof, on the accessibility to high performance computing. Note that this hypothetically limits access to small and big institutions alike, where for larger organizations the problem is one of sustainable scale.
According to Datapipe, Stratosphere, while running in the Icelandic Verne Global datacenter, harbors 32 physical core equivalents per instances and 0.5 TB and over 10,000 IOPS per volume accessible through a 10GE network.
Further, again according to Datapipe, the Stratosphere platform supports various big data tools, including Hadoop, MongoDB, Redis, and Basho Riak among other NoSQL systems.
It will be intriguing to see how this partnership progresses, especially considering the green pedigree of the Verne Icelandic datacenter.
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