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Evaluating the Efficacy of the Cloud for Cluster ComputationComputing requirements vary by industry, and it follows that NASA and other research organizations have computing demands that fall outside the mainstream. While cloud computing made rapid inroads for tasks such as powering web applications, performance issues on highly distributed tasks hindered early adoption for scientific computation. One venture to address this problem is Nebula, NASA's homegrown cloud project tasked with delivering science-quality cloud computing resources. However, another industry development is Amazon's high-performance computing (HPC) instances on Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2) that promises improved performance for cluster computation. This paper presents results from a series of benchmarks run on Amazon EC2 and discusses the efficacy of current commercial cloud technology for running scientific applications across a cluster. In particular, a 240-core cluster of cloud instances achieved 2 TFLOPS on High-Performance Linpack (HPL) at 70% of theoretical computational performance. The cluster's local network also demonstrated sub-100 ?s inter-process latency with sustained inter-node throughput in excess of 8 Gbps. Beyond HPL, a real-world Hadoop image processing task from NASA's Lunar Mapping and Modeling Project (LMMP) was run on a 29 instance cluster to process lunar and Martian surface images with sizes on the order of tens of gigapixels. These results demonstrate that while not a rival of dedicated supercomputing clusters, commercial cloud technology is now a feasible option for moderately demanding scientific workloads.
Document ID
20150008748
Acquisition Source
Jet Propulsion Laboratory
Document Type
Conference Paper
External Source(s)
Authors
Knight, David
(Jet Propulsion Lab., California Inst. of Tech. Pasadena, CA, United States)
Shams, Khawaja
(Jet Propulsion Lab., California Inst. of Tech. Pasadena, CA, United States)
Chang, George
(Jet Propulsion Lab., California Inst. of Tech. Pasadena, CA, United States)
Soderstrom, Tom
(Jet Propulsion Lab., California Inst. of Tech. Pasadena, CA, United States)
Date Acquired
May 26, 2015
Publication Date
March 3, 2012
Subject Category
Computer Systems
Meeting Information
Meeting: IEEE Aerospace Conference
Location: Big Sky, MT
Country: United States
Start Date: March 3, 2010
End Date: March 10, 2010
Sponsors: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
Distribution Limits
Public
Copyright
Other
Keywords
Cloud Computing
Scientific Computing

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