Title
Experiences with Target-Platform Heterogeneity in Clouds, Grids, and On-Premises Resources
Abstract
Heterogeneity in secondary characteristics of different HPC target platforms is the focus of this paper. Clusters, grids, and (IaaS) clouds may appear straightforward to configure to be interchangeable - but our experiences with mainstream parallel codes for CFD demonstrate that secondary attributes - support software, interconnect type, availability, access, and cost - expose heterogeneous aspects that impact overall effectiveness of application execution. The emergence of clouds as alternatives to grids and local resources for parallel HPC codes portends "computing as a utility" in science and engineering domains. Our experiences provide preliminary insights into characterizing these different types of platforms to which users typically have access - and show where the tradeoffs can be, in terms of deployment effort, actual and nominal costs, application performance, and availability (both in terms of resource size and time to gain access). For our test application, we report that each of the platforms to which we had access had its particular benefits and drawbacks in terms of the above attributes. More generally, our experiences may provide an example preview into what developers and users can expect when selecting a "utility provider" and specific instance thereof for a particular run of their application.
Year
DOI
Venue
2012
10.1109/IPDPSW.2012.20
IPDPS Workshops
Keywords
Field
DocType
target-platform heterogeneity,different hpc target platform,parallel hpc code,on-premises resources,application execution,secondary attribute,application performance,different type,particular run,mainstream parallel code,test application,particular benefit,finite element methods,computer architecture,cloud computing,grid computing,vectors,mathematical model,clusters,parallel processing,cfd
Software deployment,Grid computing,Computer science,Parallel computing,Parallel processing,Software,Distributed computing,Cloud computing
Conference
ISSN
Citations 
PageRank 
2164-7062
6
0.59
References 
Authors
4
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Jaroslaw Slawinski1357.50
Tiziano Passerini2184.14
Umberto Villa3306.64
Alessandro Veneziani413121.79
Vaidy Sunderam51268237.47