DESIGN OF RESEARCH-SPECIFIC CLOUD SYSTEM FOR HIGH-PERFORMANCE COMPUTING OVER CLOUD SERVICE

Traditional high-performance computing (HPC) services for scientific applications offer high performance and advantages such as large-scale task execution, concurrency, load balancing, and system utilization. However, they fail to provide any scalability due to their inflexible architectures. Therefore, to provide scalability as well as cloud advantages, “HPC over Cloud services” has become a major area of interest in the field of HPC research. To provide a HPC over Cloud service, any of three representative base architectures can be adopted. These are bare metal (BM)-based, container-based, and virtual machine (VM)-based. The results of a study which compared these three base architectures indicated that the container- and BM-based architectures offer almost the same levels of performance. In this study, we set out to design a research-specific cloud system for HPC over Cloud service. As part of our efforts, we build a test-bed system which provides a real container-based HPC over Cloud service for evaluation. The results of our experiments indicate that the proposed system architecture for a container-based HPC over Cloud service can be successfully adopted for practical applications.