The Uber-Cloud Experiment

By Wolfgang Gentzsch and Burak Yenier

June 28, 2012

Delivering high performance computing as a service comes with a set of challenges, both technical and social. In this article, Wolfgang Gentzsch and Burak Yenier discuss the various aspects of the service model, the people that need to be involved in the process, and the challenges faced when executing workloads on remote HPC resources. They will also describe an open HPC-as-a-Service experiment that they have come up with to bring together industry end users, resource providers, software providers, and HPC experts. 

The technology components of HPC-as-a-Service that enable multi-tenant, remote access to centralized resources, and metered use are not unfamiliar to this community. However, as service-based delivery models take off, with its promise of easy access to pay-per-use computing, our users have been mostly on the fence, observing and discussing the potential hurdles to its adoption in HPC.

Even with the challenges of data privacy, incompatible software licensing models, and a dozen other potential roadblocks, it’s time we dip our toes in the water and figure out how to achieve the benefits of service-based delivery. How far are we from an ideal HPC-as-a-Service model? At this point, nobody knows.

What is fairly certain is that we now have the technology ingredients to make it happen. To glue it together into a coherent end-to-end process, the authors have come up with the “Uber-Cloud Experiment.” We will perform this experiment manually  — that is, not via an actual automated cloud service — because we believe the technology is not the challenge anymore; rather it’s the people.

To start, let’s define what roles each stakeholder has to play to make service-based HPC come together. In this case, stakeholders consist of industrial end users, resource providers, software providers, and high performance computing experts.

The industry end users: A typical example is a small or medium size manufacturer in the process of designing and prototyping its next product. These users are candidates for HPC-as-a-Service when in-house computation on workstations has become too lengthy a process, but acquiring additional computing power in the form of HPC is too cumbersome or is not in line with budgets. HPC is not likely to be the core expertise of this group.

The resource providers: This pertains to anyone who owns HPC resources, computers, and storage, and is networked to the outside world. A classic HPC center would fall into this category, as well as a standard datacenter used to handle batch jobs, or a cluster-owning commercial entity that is willing to offer up cycles to run non-competitive workloads during periods of low CPU-utilization.

The application software provider: This includes software owners of all stripes, including ISVs, public domain organizations and individual developers. We are looking for rock-solid software, which has the potential to be used on a wider scale. For the purpose of this experiment, on-demand license usage will be tracked in order to determine the feasibility of using the service model as a revenue stream.

The HPC experts: This group includes individuals or companies with HPC expertise, especially in areas like cluster management. It also encompasses PhD-level domain specialists with in-depth application knowledge. In the experiment, experts will work with end users, computer centers, and software providers to help glue the pieces together.

For example, suppose the user is in need of additional compute resources to speed up a product design cycle, say for simulating more sophisticated geometry or physics, or for running many more simulations for a higher quality result. That suggests a specific software stack, domain expertise, and even hardware configuration. The general idea is to look at the end user’s task and select the appropriate resources, software and expertise that match its requirements.

Then, with modest guidance, the user, resource providers, and HPC experts will implement and run the task and deliver the results. The hardware and software providers will measure resource usage; the HPC expert will summarize the steps of analysis and implementation; the end user will evaluate the quality of the process and of the results and the degree of user-friendliness this process provided. We, as the experiment orchestrators, will analyze the feedback received. Finally, the team will get together, extract lessons learned, and present further recommendations as input for the corresponding case study.

The downside for active participants? It will require some time and effort, but there’s no monetary cost. The potential payoff is that participants will get to work with an expert team, hopefully gain some insight into a new service paradigm, and find out if this is an appropriate model for their particular business or application.

The experiment is scheduled to begin later in July and run for three months. At that point, the results will be made publicly available to the HPC community. Anyone interested in participating can register at www.hpcexperiment.com.

—–

The experiment managers: Wolfgang Gentzsch and Burak Yenier. Wolfgang is an HPC veteran. Having worked in leading positions in research, academia, and industry for some 30 years, Wolfgang is now an HPC consultant and the Chairman of the ISC Cloud conference series for HPC and Big Data in the Cloud. Burak is the Vice President of Operations at CashEdge, a software-as-a-service company in Silicon Valley, which provides innovative payments and aggregation solutions to financial institutions.

The observer and reporter: Tom Tabor is the CEO of Tabor Communications Inc. (TCI) running HPCwire, HPC in the Cloud, Datanami and the Digital Manufacturing Report. TCI publications will follow the experiment and will post status reports; provide high-level analyses of the process and interviews with active participants, and broadcast webinars.

The sponsors: Sponsors of this experiment are all those of you who commit to support the industry end user, compute resource providers, software vendors and organizations, and HPC experts and organizations. A great example is the Digital Science Center at the Indiana University, led by Geoffrey Fox. The center joins the experiment with its compute and storage resources and with its HPC expertise.

Subscribe to HPCwire's Weekly Update!

Be the most informed person in the room! Stay ahead of the tech trends with industry updates delivered to you every week!

MLPerf Inference 4.0 Results Showcase GenAI; Nvidia Still Dominates

March 28, 2024

There were no startling surprises in the latest MLPerf Inference benchmark (4.0) results released yesterday. Two new workloads — Llama 2 and Stable Diffusion XL — were added to the benchmark suite as MLPerf continues Read more…

Q&A with Nvidia’s Chief of DGX Systems on the DGX-GB200 Rack-scale System

March 27, 2024

Pictures of Nvidia's new flagship mega-server, the DGX GB200, on the GTC show floor got favorable reactions on social media for the sheer amount of computing power it brings to artificial intelligence.  Nvidia's DGX Read more…

Call for Participation in Workshop on Potential NSF CISE Quantum Initiative

March 26, 2024

Editor’s Note: Next month there will be a workshop to discuss what a quantum initiative led by NSF’s Computer, Information Science and Engineering (CISE) directorate could entail. The details are posted below in a Ca Read more…

Waseda U. Researchers Reports New Quantum Algorithm for Speeding Optimization

March 25, 2024

Optimization problems cover a wide range of applications and are often cited as good candidates for quantum computing. However, the execution time for constrained combinatorial optimization applications on quantum device Read more…

NVLink: Faster Interconnects and Switches to Help Relieve Data Bottlenecks

March 25, 2024

Nvidia’s new Blackwell architecture may have stolen the show this week at the GPU Technology Conference in San Jose, California. But an emerging bottleneck at the network layer threatens to make bigger and brawnier pro Read more…

Who is David Blackwell?

March 22, 2024

During GTC24, co-founder and president of NVIDIA Jensen Huang unveiled the Blackwell GPU. This GPU itself is heavily optimized for AI work, boasting 192GB of HBM3E memory as well as the the ability to train 1 trillion pa Read more…

MLPerf Inference 4.0 Results Showcase GenAI; Nvidia Still Dominates

March 28, 2024

There were no startling surprises in the latest MLPerf Inference benchmark (4.0) results released yesterday. Two new workloads — Llama 2 and Stable Diffusion Read more…

Q&A with Nvidia’s Chief of DGX Systems on the DGX-GB200 Rack-scale System

March 27, 2024

Pictures of Nvidia's new flagship mega-server, the DGX GB200, on the GTC show floor got favorable reactions on social media for the sheer amount of computing po Read more…

NVLink: Faster Interconnects and Switches to Help Relieve Data Bottlenecks

March 25, 2024

Nvidia’s new Blackwell architecture may have stolen the show this week at the GPU Technology Conference in San Jose, California. But an emerging bottleneck at Read more…

Who is David Blackwell?

March 22, 2024

During GTC24, co-founder and president of NVIDIA Jensen Huang unveiled the Blackwell GPU. This GPU itself is heavily optimized for AI work, boasting 192GB of HB Read more…

Nvidia Looks to Accelerate GenAI Adoption with NIM

March 19, 2024

Today at the GPU Technology Conference, Nvidia launched a new offering aimed at helping customers quickly deploy their generative AI applications in a secure, s Read more…

The Generative AI Future Is Now, Nvidia’s Huang Says

March 19, 2024

We are in the early days of a transformative shift in how business gets done thanks to the advent of generative AI, according to Nvidia CEO and cofounder Jensen Read more…

Nvidia’s New Blackwell GPU Can Train AI Models with Trillions of Parameters

March 18, 2024

Nvidia's latest and fastest GPU, codenamed Blackwell, is here and will underpin the company's AI plans this year. The chip offers performance improvements from Read more…

Nvidia Showcases Quantum Cloud, Expanding Quantum Portfolio at GTC24

March 18, 2024

Nvidia’s barrage of quantum news at GTC24 this week includes new products, signature collaborations, and a new Nvidia Quantum Cloud for quantum developers. Wh Read more…

Alibaba Shuts Down its Quantum Computing Effort

November 30, 2023

In case you missed it, China’s e-commerce giant Alibaba has shut down its quantum computing research effort. It’s not entirely clear what drove the change. Read more…

Nvidia H100: Are 550,000 GPUs Enough for This Year?

August 17, 2023

The GPU Squeeze continues to place a premium on Nvidia H100 GPUs. In a recent Financial Times article, Nvidia reports that it expects to ship 550,000 of its lat Read more…

Shutterstock 1285747942

AMD’s Horsepower-packed MI300X GPU Beats Nvidia’s Upcoming H200

December 7, 2023

AMD and Nvidia are locked in an AI performance battle – much like the gaming GPU performance clash the companies have waged for decades. AMD has claimed it Read more…

DoD Takes a Long View of Quantum Computing

December 19, 2023

Given the large sums tied to expensive weapon systems – think $100-million-plus per F-35 fighter – it’s easy to forget the U.S. Department of Defense is a Read more…

Synopsys Eats Ansys: Does HPC Get Indigestion?

February 8, 2024

Recently, it was announced that Synopsys is buying HPC tool developer Ansys. Started in Pittsburgh, Pa., in 1970 as Swanson Analysis Systems, Inc. (SASI) by John Swanson (and eventually renamed), Ansys serves the CAE (Computer Aided Engineering)/multiphysics engineering simulation market. Read more…

Choosing the Right GPU for LLM Inference and Training

December 11, 2023

Accelerating the training and inference processes of deep learning models is crucial for unleashing their true potential and NVIDIA GPUs have emerged as a game- Read more…

Intel’s Server and PC Chip Development Will Blur After 2025

January 15, 2024

Intel's dealing with much more than chip rivals breathing down its neck; it is simultaneously integrating a bevy of new technologies such as chiplets, artificia Read more…

Baidu Exits Quantum, Closely Following Alibaba’s Earlier Move

January 5, 2024

Reuters reported this week that Baidu, China’s giant e-commerce and services provider, is exiting the quantum computing development arena. Reuters reported � Read more…

Leading Solution Providers

Contributors

Comparing NVIDIA A100 and NVIDIA L40S: Which GPU is Ideal for AI and Graphics-Intensive Workloads?

October 30, 2023

With long lead times for the NVIDIA H100 and A100 GPUs, many organizations are looking at the new NVIDIA L40S GPU, which it’s a new GPU optimized for AI and g Read more…

Shutterstock 1179408610

Google Addresses the Mysteries of Its Hypercomputer 

December 28, 2023

When Google launched its Hypercomputer earlier this month (December 2023), the first reaction was, "Say what?" It turns out that the Hypercomputer is Google's t Read more…

AMD MI3000A

How AMD May Get Across the CUDA Moat

October 5, 2023

When discussing GenAI, the term "GPU" almost always enters the conversation and the topic often moves toward performance and access. Interestingly, the word "GPU" is assumed to mean "Nvidia" products. (As an aside, the popular Nvidia hardware used in GenAI are not technically... Read more…

Shutterstock 1606064203

Meta’s Zuckerberg Puts Its AI Future in the Hands of 600,000 GPUs

January 25, 2024

In under two minutes, Meta's CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, laid out the company's AI plans, which included a plan to build an artificial intelligence system with the eq Read more…

Google Introduces ‘Hypercomputer’ to Its AI Infrastructure

December 11, 2023

Google ran out of monikers to describe its new AI system released on December 7. Supercomputer perhaps wasn't an apt description, so it settled on Hypercomputer Read more…

China Is All In on a RISC-V Future

January 8, 2024

The state of RISC-V in China was discussed in a recent report released by the Jamestown Foundation, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank. The report, entitled "E Read more…

Intel Won’t Have a Xeon Max Chip with New Emerald Rapids CPU

December 14, 2023

As expected, Intel officially announced its 5th generation Xeon server chips codenamed Emerald Rapids at an event in New York City, where the focus was really o Read more…

IBM Quantum Summit: Two New QPUs, Upgraded Qiskit, 10-year Roadmap and More

December 4, 2023

IBM kicks off its annual Quantum Summit today and will announce a broad range of advances including its much-anticipated 1121-qubit Condor QPU, a smaller 133-qu Read more…

  • arrow
  • Click Here for More Headlines
  • arrow
HPCwire