HPC Application Services Providing Portal

High performance computing (HPC) is widely used nowadays. But the investment in HPC is a large amount both in hardware/software purchasing and maintenance. So the market has a desire in looking for application services providers (ASP) to provide the HPC services. The providers set up all the required HPC infrastructures. Users can subscribe and remotely access the highend resources via Internet through a low-end computer with a browser. It makes HPC services available at anytime, anyplace and on any device. This helps greatly in reducing individual HPC investment and makes HPC resources widely available. Based on this desire in the market, an HPC application services providing portal has been set up in the Institute of High Performance Computing (IHPC), Singapore. This paper first briefly reviews the existing ASPS in the market. Then it describes the features of the HPC application services providing portal in IHPC. It also presents the three-tier distributed computing architecture for extending HPC resources from high-end servers to low-end desktop computers. The HTML-based Unix shell command tools and data transferring tools are also designed because of the security limitations. Finally, the implementation of the portal is given and conclusions are drawn on it.