CloudLightning Report Looks at Barriers to HPC in the Cloud
The CloudLightning Project in Europe has published preliminary results from a survey on Barriers to Using HPC in the Cloud.
"Cloud
computing is transforming the utilization and efficiency of IT infrastructures
across all sectors. Historically, cloud computing has not been used for high
performance computing (HPC) to the same degree as other use cases for a number
of reasons. This executive briefing is a preliminary report of a larger study
on demand-side barriers and drivers of cloud computing adoption for HPC. A more
comprehensive report and analysis will be published later in 2016. From June to
August 2016, the CloudLightning project surveyed over 170 HPC discrete end
users worldwide in the academic, commercial and government sectors on their HPC
use, perceived drivers and barriers to using cloud computing, and uses of cloud
computing for HPC."
As
shown in Figure 2, trust in cloud computing would appear to be a significant
barrier to adopting cloud computing for HPC workloads. Data management concerns
dominate the responses. This is not surprising given the large number of
bio-science and university and academic respondents within the sample. The main
technical barriers relate to communication speeds. This reflects a perceived
lack of cloud infrastructure capable of meeting the communications and I/O
requirements of high-end technical computing. Government policy is again ranked
low it would seem it is neither a driver nor a barrier. Unsurprisingly
availability and capital expenditure are not barriers reflecting their positive
impact on adoption.
According
to the report, there is unlikely to be a full shift of high performance
computing workloads to the cloud in the short term however there is evidence of
demand to meet the capacity limitations of internal infrastructures including
use cases for testing the viability of the cloud or specific software for
various use cases. This is consistent with previous research.
"Funded
by the European Commission’s Horizon 2020 Program for Research and Innovation,
CloudLightning brings together eight project partners from five countries
across Europe. The project proposes to create a new way of provisioning
heterogeneous cloud resources to deliver services, specified by the user, using
a bespoke service description language. Our goal is to address energy
inefficiencies particularly in the use of resources and consequently to deliver
savings to the cloud provider and the cloud consumer in terms of reduced power
consumption and improved service delivery, with hyperscale systems particularly
in mind."
