HPC Advisory Advanced Topics

High-performance computing provides an invaluable role in research, product development and education. Over the past decade, HPC has migrated from supercomputers to commodity clusters. Eighty-two percent of the Top 500 HPC installations in November 2008 were clusters. The driver for this move is a combination of Moore’s Law (enabling higher performance computers at lower costs) and the ultimate drive for the best cost/performance and power/performance.

Once the domain of scientists and researchers, HPC has moved into the mainstream to replace multi-million dollar mainframes and supercomputers with networks and clusters of microcomputers acting in unison to deliver high end computing services. As HPC moves deeper into the enterprise marketplace, the applications served by these machines have bifurcated into classes of systems - modeling, analysis and prediction, and enterprise-class computing.

One of the main advantages of HPC clusters is the flexibility and efficiency they bring to their user. With the increase in the number of applications being served by HPC systems, new systems need to server multiple users and multiple applications. Traditional HPC systems typically served a single application at a given time, but in order to maintain high flexibility HPC a new concept of HPC as a Service (HPCaaS) has been developed. The HPC Advisory Council has been one of the first organizations to perform research activities and to provide guidelines for OEMs and end-users for developing HPCaaS clusters.

Smart scheduling strategies for HPCaaS are essential in order to be able to host multiple applications simultaneously while maintaining or even increasing the total systems productivity.

Case: Scheduling Strategies for HPC as a Service (HPCaaS) for Bio-Science Applications