Applications like Big Data, Machine Learning, Deep Learning and even other Engineering and Scientific research requires a lot of computing power; making High-Performance Computing (HPC) an important field. But access to Supercomputers is out of range from the majority. Nowadays Supercomputers are actually clusters of computers usually made-up of commodity hardware. Such clusters are called Beowulf Clusters. The history of which goes back to 1994 when NASA built a Supercomputer by creating a cluster of commodity hardware. In recent times a lot of effort has been done in making HPC Clusters of even single board computers (SBCs). Although the creation of clusters of commodity hardware is possible but is a cumbersome task. Moreover, the maintenance of such systems is also difficult and requires special expertise and time. The concept of cloud is to provide on-demand resources that can be services, platform or even infrastructure and this is done by sharing a big resource pool. Cloud computing has resolved problems like maintenance of hardware and requirement of having expertise in networking etc. An effort is made of bringing concepts from cloud computing to HPC in order to get benefits of cloud. The main target is to create a system which can develop a capability of providing computing power as a service which to further be referred to as Supercomputer as a service. A prototype was made using Raspberry Pi (RPi) 3B and 3B+ Single Board Computers. The reason for using RPi boards was increasing popularity of ARM processors in the field of HPC
The state-of-the-art approach to manage blockchains is to process blocks of transactions in a shared-nothing environment. Although blockchains have the potential to provide various services for high-performance computing (HPC) systems, HPC will not be able to embrace blockchains before the following two missing pieces become available: (i) new consensus protocols being aware of the shared-storage architecture in HPC, and (ii) new fault-tolerant mechanisms compensating for HPC's programming model---the message passing interface (MPI)---that is vulnerable for blockchain-like workloads. To this e…
HPC as a service (HPCaaS) is a new way to expose HPC resources via cloud services. However, continued effort to port large-scale tightly coupled applications with high interprocessor communication to multiple (and many) nodes synchronously, as in on-premise supercomputers, is still far from satisfactory due to network latencies. As a consequence, in said cases, HPCaaS is recommended to be used with one or few instances. In this paper we take the claim that new piece of memory hardware, namely Non-Volatile RAM (NVRAM), can allow such computations to scale up to an order of magnitude with margin…
Several scientific and industry applications require High Performance Computing (HPC) resources to process and/or simulate complex models. Not long ago, companies, research institutes, and universities used to acquire and maintain on-premise computer clusters; but, recently, cloud computing has emerged as an alternative for a subset of HPC applications. This poses a challenge to end-users, who have to decide where to run their jobs: on local clusters or burst to a remote cloud service provider. While current research on HPC cloud has focused on comparing performance of on-premise clusters agai…
Cloud computing provides ubiquitous and on-demand access to vast reconfigurable resources that can meet any computational need. Many service models are available, but the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) model is particularly suited to operate as a high performance computing (HPC) platform, by networking large numbers of cloud computing nodes. We used the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) cloud computing environment to perform our experiments. A number of cloud computing providers such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, or IBM Cloud, offer flexible and scalable computing res…
This Letter considers the design for computing facilities that are complementary to the leadership class High Performance Computing (HPC) facilities. This design envisions a future where funding agencies are allocating greater resources for leadership class facilities and these facilities will provide a significant part of the total compute cycles for HEP Experiments. While a leadership class facility (LCF) may provide cycles and advanced architectures, the facility does not necessarily provide all of the services needed to help HEP users make the best use of the HPC facility, as well as the s…
The Minnesota Supercomputing Institute has implemented Jupyterhub and the Jupyter notebook server as a general-purpose point-of-entry to interactive high performance computing services. This mode of operation runs counter to traditional job-oriented HPC operations, but offers significant advantages for ease-of-use, data exploration, prototyping, and workflow development. From the user perspective, these features bring the computing cluster nearer to parity with emerging cloud computing options. On the other hand, retreating from fully-scheduled, job-based resource allocation poses challenges f…
Argonne National Laboratory（阿贡国家实验室）；Université Paris-Saclay（巴黎萨克雷大学）；University of Oregon（俄勒冈大学）
Distributed data storage services tailored to specific applications have grown popular in the high-performance computing (HPC) community as a way to address I/O and storage challenges. These services offer a variety of specific interfaces, semantics, and data representations. They also expose many tuning parameters, making it difficult for their users to find the best configuration for a given workload and platform. To address this issue, we develop a novel variational-autoencoder-guided asynchronous Bayesian optimization method to tune HPC storage service parameters. Our approach uses transfe…
Solving the software dependency issue under the HPC environment has always been a difficult task for both computing system administrators and application scientists. This work would like to tackle the issue by introducing the modern container technology, the Docker, to be specific. By integrating the auto-scaling feature of service discovery with the light-weight virtualization tool, the Docker, the construction of a virtual cluster on top of physical cluster hardware is attempted. Thus, through the isolation of computing environment, a remedy of software dependency of HPC environment is possi…
High Performance Computing (HPC) clouds are becoming an alternative to on-premise clusters for executing scientific applications and business analytics services. Most research efforts in HPC cloud aim to understand the cost-benefit of moving resource-intensive applications from on-premise environments to public cloud platforms. Industry trends show hybrid environments are the natural path to get the best of the on-premise and cloud resources---steady (and sensitive) workloads can run on on-premise resources and peak demand can leverage remote resources in a pay-as-you-go manner. Nevertheless, …
Modern HPC workload managers and their careful tuning contribute to the high utilization of HPC clusters. However, due to inevitable uncertainty it is impossible to completely avoid node idleness. Although such idle slots are usually too short for any HPC job, they are too long to ignore them. Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) paradigm promisingly fills this gap, and can be a good match, as typical FaaS functions last seconds, not hours. Here we show how to build a FaaS infrastructure on idle nodes in an HPC cluster in such a way that it does not affect the performance of the HPC jobs significantly…
For large-scale scientific simulations, it is expensive to store raw simulation results to perform post-analysis. To minimize expensive I/O, "in-situ" analysis is often used, where analysis applications are tightly coupled with scientific simulations and can access and process the simulation results in memory. Increasingly, scientific domains employ Big Data approaches to analyze simulations for scientific discoveries. However, it remains a challenge to organize, transform, and transport data at scale between the two semantically different ecosystems (HPC and Cloud systems). In an effort to ad…
Methods developed at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) are described and demonstrated for automating the construction of an elastic, virtual cluster emulating the Stampede2 high performance computing (HPC) system. The cluster can be built and/or scaled in a matter of minutes on the Jetstream self-service cloud system and shares many properties of the original Stampede2, including: i) common identity management, ii) access to the same file systems, iii) equivalent software application stack and module system, iv) similar job scheduling interface via Slurm. We measure time-to-solution f…
Diamond Agent: Agentic Control of Federated HPC Resources as a Service
Rutgers University（罗格斯大学）；University of Rochester（罗切斯特大学）；National Center for Supercomputing Applications（国家超级计算应用中心）；University of Wisconsin–Madison（威斯康星大学麦迪逊分校）；University of Chicago（芝加哥大学）；Argonne National Laboratory（阿贡国家实验室）
As primary provider for research computing services at the University of Minnesota, the Minnesota Supercomputing Institute (MSI) has long been responsible for serving the needs of a user-base numbering in the thousands. In recent years, MSI---like many other HPC centers---has observed a growing need for self-service, on-demand, data-intensive research, as well as the emergence of many new controlled-access datasets for research purposes. In light of this, MSI constructed a new on-premise cloud service, named Stratus, which is architected from the ground up to easily satisfy data-use agreements…
Hardware support for high-performance computing (HPC) has so far been subject to significant advances. The pervasiveness of HPC systems, mainly made up with parallel computing units, makes it crucial to spread and vivify effective HPC curricula. Besides didactic considerations, it appears very important to implement HPC hardware infrastructures that will serves for practices, and also for scientific and industrial requests. The latter ensures a valuable connection with surrounding cutting-edge research activities in other topics ({\em life sciences, physics, data mining, applied mathematics, f…
We introduce the Balsam service to manage high-throughput task scheduling and execution on supercomputing systems. Balsam allows users to populate a task database with a variety of tasks ranging from simple independent tasks to dynamic multi-task workflows. With abstractions for the local resource scheduler and MPI environment, Balsam dynamically packages tasks into ensemble jobs and manages their scheduling lifecycle. The ensembles execute in a pilot "launcher" which (i) ensures concurrent, load-balanced execution of arbitrary serial and parallel programs with heterogeneous processor requirem…
The availability of powerful computing hardware in IaaS clouds makes cloud computing attractive also for computational workloads that were up to now almost exclusively run on HPC clusters. In this paper we present the VM-MAD Orchestrator software: an open source framework for cloudbursting Linux-based HPC clusters into IaaS clouds but also computational grids. The Orchestrator is completely modular, allowing flexible configurations of cloudbursting policies. It can be used with any batch system or cloud infrastructure, dynamically extending the cluster when needed. A distinctive feature of our…
Data stores are the foundation on which data science, in all its variations, is built upon. They provide a queryable interface to structured and unstructured data. Data science often starts by leveraging these query features to perform initial data preparation. However, most data stores are designed to run continuously to service disparate user requests with little or no downtime. Many HPC architectures process user requests by job queue scheduler and maintain a shard filesystem to store a jobs persistent data. We deploy a MongoDB sharded cluster with a run script that is designed to run a dat…
Different departments of a large organization often run dedicated cluster systems for different computing loads, like HPC (high performance computing) jobs or Web service applications. In this paper, we have designed and implemented a cloud management system software Phoenix Cloud to consolidate heterogeneous workloads from different departments affiliated to the same organization on the shared cluster system. We have also proposed cooperative resource provisioning and management policies for a large organization and its affiliated departments, running HPC jobs and Web service applications, to…
With the growing scale and complexity of high-performance computing (HPC) systems, resilience solutions that ensure continuity of service despite frequent errors and component failures must be methodically designed to balance the reliability requirements with the overheads to performance and power. Design patterns enable a structured approach to the development of resilience solutions, providing hardware and software designers with the building block elements for the rapid development of novel solutions and for adapting existing technologies for emerging, extreme-scale HPC environments. In thi…
The world of computing is in rapid transition, now dominated by a world of smartphones and cloud services, with profound implications for the future of advanced scientific computing. Simply put, high-performance computing (HPC) is at an important inflection point. For the last 60 years, the world's fastest supercomputers were almost exclusively produced in the United States on behalf of scientific research in the national laboratories. Change is now in the wind. While costs now stretch the limits of U.S. government funding for advanced computing, Japan and China are now leaders in the bespoke …
Cloud computing has become the ubiquitous computing and storage paradigm. It is also attractive for scientists, because they do not have to care any more for their own IT infrastructure, but can outsource it to a Cloud Service Provider of their choice. However, for the case of High-Performance Computing (HPC) in a cloud, as it is needed in simulations or for Big Data analysis, things are getting more intricate, because HPC codes must stay highly efficient, even when executed by many virtual cores (vCPUs). Older clouds or new standard clouds can fulfil this only under special precautions, which…
Improving the Efficiency of a Deep Reinforcement Learning-Based Power Management System for HPC Clusters Using Curriculum Learning
Department of Computer Science and Electronics, Universitas Gadjah Mada（加雅达大学计算机科学与电子系）；Cyberscience Center, Tohoku University（东大网络科学中心）；Department of Industrial Management, National Taiwan University of Science and Technology（台湾科技大学工业管理系）
Container technologies such as Docker have become a crucial component of many software industry practices especially those pertaining to reproducibility and portability. The containerization philosophy has influenced the scientific computing community, which has begun to adopt - and even develop - container technologies (such as Singularity). Leveraging containers for scientific software often poses challenges distinct from those encountered in industry, and requires different methodologies. This is especially true for HPC. With an increasing number of options for HPC in the cloud (including N…
Massive upgrades to science infrastructure are driving data velocities upwards while stimulating adoption of increasingly data-intensive analytics. While next-generation exascale supercomputers promise strong support for I/O-intensive workflows, HPC remains largely untapped by live experiments, because data transfers and disparate batch-queueing policies are prohibitive when faced with scarce instrument time. To bridge this divide, we introduce Balsam: a distributed orchestration platform enabling workflows at the edge to securely and efficiently trigger analytics tasks across a user-managed f…
A non-invasive, cloud-agnostic approach is demonstrated for extending existing cloud platforms to include checkpoint-restart capability. Most cloud platforms currently rely on each application to provide its own fault tolerance. A uniform mechanism within the cloud itself serves two purposes: (a) direct support for long-running jobs, which would otherwise require a custom fault-tolerant mechanism for each application; and (b) the administrative capability to manage an over-subscribed cloud by temporarily swapping out jobs when higher priority jobs arrive. An advantage of this uniform approach …
Open Science is a paradigm in which scientific data, procedures, tools and results are shared transparently and reused by society as a whole. The initiative known as the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) is an effort in Europe to provide an open, trusted, virtual and federated computing environment to execute scientific applications, and to store, share and re-use research data across borders and scientific disciplines. Additionally, scientific services are becoming increasingly data-intensive, not only in terms of computationally intensive tasks but also in terms of storage resources. Comput…
Complex flow simulations are conventionally performed on HPC clusters. However, the limited availability of HPC resources and steep learning curve of executing on traditional supercomputer infrastructure has drawn attention towards deploying flow simulation software on the cloud. We showcase how a complex computational framework -- that can evaluate COVID-19 transmission risk in various indoor classroom scenarios -- can be abstracted and deployed on cloud services. The availability of such cloud-based personalized planning tools can enable educational institutions, medical institutions, public…
The increasing availability of cloud computing services for science has changed the way scientific code can be developed, deployed, and run. Many modern scientific workflows are capable of running on cloud computing resources. Consequently, there is an increasing interest in the scientific computing community in methods, tools, and implementations that enable moving an application to the cloud and simplifying the process, and decreasing the time to meaningful scientific results. In this paper, we have applied the concepts of containerization for portability and multi-cloud automated deployment…
Cloud Computing is an Internet based computing, whereby shared resources, software and information, are provided to computers and devices on demand, like the electricity grid. Currently, IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service), PaaS (Platform as a Service) and SaaS (Software as a Service) are used as a business model for Cloud Computing. Nowadays, the adoption and deployment of Cloud Computing is increasing in various domains, forcing researchers to conduct research in the area of Cloud Computing globally. Setting up the research environment is critical for the researchers in the developing countri…
Applications that exploit the architectural details of high-performance computing (HPC) systems have become increasingly invaluable in academia and industry over the past two decades. The most important hardware development of the last decade in HPC has been the General Purpose Graphics Processing Unit (GPGPU), a class of massively parallel devices that now contributes the majority of computational power in the top 500 supercomputers. As these systems grow, small costs such as latency---due to the fixed cost of memory accesses and communication---accumulate in a large simulation and become a s…
Cloud computing has become more popular in provision of computing resources under virtual machine (VM) abstraction for high performance computing (HPC) users to run their applications. A HPC cloud is such cloud computing environment. One of challenges of energy efficient resource allocation for VMs in HPC cloud is tradeoff between minimizing total energy consumption of physical machines (PMs) and satisfying Quality of Service (e.g. performance). On one hand, cloud providers want to maximize their profit by reducing the power cost (e.g. using the smallest number of running PMs). On the other ha…
High-performance computing (HPC) storage systems become increasingly critical to scientific applications given the data-driven discovery paradigm shift. As a storage solution for large-scale HPC systems, dozens of applications share the same storage system, and will compete and can interfere with each other. Application interference can dramatically degrade the overall storage system performance. Therefore, developing a flexible and effective storage solution to assure a certain level of resources per application, i.e. the Quality-of-Service (QoS) support, is critical. One of the common soluti…
Heterogeneous systems consisting of general-purpose processors and different types of hardware accelerators are becoming more and more common in HPC systems. Especially FPGAs provide a promising opportunity to improve both performance and energy efficiency of such systems. Adding FPGAs to clouds or data centers allows easy access to such reconfigurable resources. In this paper we present our cloud service models and cloud hypervisor called RC3E, which integrates virtualized FPGA-based hardware accelerators into a cloud environment. With our hardware and software framework, multiple (virtual) u…
This paper describes the achievements of the H2020 project INDIGO-DataCloud. The project has provided e-infrastructures with tools, applications and cloud framework enhancements to manage the demanding requirements of scientific communities, either locally or through enhanced interfaces. The middleware developed allows to federate hybrid resources, to easily write, port and run scientific applications to the cloud. In particular, we have extended existing PaaS (Platform as a Service) solutions, allowing public and private e-infrastructures, including those provided by EGI, EUDAT, and Helix Neb…
