published on Tuesday, November 10, 2009

SARA High Performance Computing Cloud

SARA welcomes the first users on its Proof-of-Concept High Performance Computing Cloud. SARA is convinced of the opportunities that Cloud computing provides for the academic community and investigates the use of Cloud Computing in High Performance Computing applications. To evaluate and share the experiences with the e-Science community four groups of researchers are currently participating in an evaluation. Each group has the opportunity to experiment with state of the art technology for their specific application needs. SARA provides each user with access to their own Virtual Private Compute Cluster in the test Cloud, aptly named "Claudia", and supports the implementation of working demonstrations as a proof of concept.

Why High Performance Cloud Computing?
The concept of Cloud computing is tightly related to the virtualization of resources. Using virtualized computing resources, a dynamic, scalable and flexible set of computational services can be obtained. End-users and developers can select, create and configure their own operating system and software in virtual images and thus completely configure the computing resources.

The difference between a standard Cloud solution as provided by commercial vendors and a High Performance Cloud for the academic world is that the applications in the SARA HPC Cloud are very computationally and data intensive. Therefore specialized hardware and software is needed to accommodate this advanced type of usage of virtualization.

We expect that the use of Virtual Private Compute Clusters will significantly reduce the time to a solution for our demanding users. Importantly, the ability to fully configure and control the environment where applications are run, will lead to less time spent in porting applications. As an additional service SARA will provide templates for specific applications that academic users can use and adapt to their needs.

We expect first results of the experiment in December and aim at providing High Performance Cloud Computing as a valuable service for the Dutch academic community in 2010.

SARA Computing and Networking Services
SARA is the Dutch National Supercomputing and e-Science Support Center. SARA supports frontier academic research by providing and supporting significant portions of the National and European ICT research infrastructure (http://www.sara.nl). tel. +31 (0)20 592 3000.

More information and contact
Floris Sluiter (project leader), floris.sluiter@sara.nl
Tom Visser, tom.visser@sara.nl