Hybrid HPC Cloud Strategies from the Student Cluster Competition

摘要

The value of running high performance and throughput applications on cloud or on-premises resources is a topic of increasing importance. At the annual Student Cluster Competition at the SC conference, teams race High Performance Compute (HPC) clusters for 46 hours straight to find solutions to scientific and engineering application workloads. In 2017, a cloud component was added, and students were tasked with deciding how to best to use the cloud. They had to decide which competition applications should run in the cloud versus their on-premises clusters and efficiently manage their computing budget, both in terms of on-premises power and their monetary cloud budget. Using these teams' experiences as a case study, we have a unique opportunity to examine and glean insights from the strategies, outcomes and attitudes toward using a hybrid model for HPC.