Options for HPC use on Amazon Web Services continue to grow. An AWS post yesterday noted Alces Flight – an HPC cluster provisioning and Software as a Service company (SaaS) with a library of 750 scientific applications – is now available for AWS users.
Jeff Barr, AWS’s Chief Evangelist, noted in his related post, “Today we are making Alces Flight available in AWS Marketplace. This is a fully-featured HPC environment that you can launch in a matter of minutes. It can make use of On-Demand or Spot Instances and comes complete with a job scheduler and hundreds of HPC applications that are all set up and ready to run. Some of the applications include built-in collaborative features such as shared graphical views.”
“Each cluster is launched into a Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) with SSH and graphical desktop connectivity. Clusters can be of fixed size, or can be Auto Scaled in order to meet changes in demand. Once launched, the cluster looks and behaves just like a traditional Linux-powered HPC cluster, with shared NFS storage and passwordless SSH access to the compute nodes. It includes access to HPC applications, libraries, tools, and MPI suites,” he wrote.
The company is UK-based and a cursory web search turned up little background. The description posted on Amazon is: “After designing and managing hundreds of HPC workflows for national and academic supercomputing centers in the United Kingdom, Alces built and validated hundreds of HPC workflows tailored to researchers across most fields of science. Alces’ automated applications built for supercomputing centers, and is now making that catalog available in AWS Marketplace.” Presumably AWS has done the vetting.
The listed library of tools and software is extensive and many domains. The use of on-demand and spot instances may limit some uses, but this HPC addition to the AWS is yet more evidence of HPC’s rapid migration to the cloud.