ABSTRACT

222In recent times, cloud computing has gained the interest of High Performance Computing (HPC) for providing HPC environments on-demand, at low cost and in an easy to use manner. While the potential for HPC clouds exists, there are challenges (such as performance and communication issues) and some experts deem cloud computing inappropriate for HPC.

This chapter investigates what challenges exist when attempting to use clouds for HPC and demonstrates the effectiveness of HPC cloud computing through broad benchmarking and through a new prototype cloud called HPCynergy - a cloud built solely to satisfy the needs of HPC clients. This chapter demonstrates, via benchmarking comparisons between clouds such as EC2, HPCynergy, virtual and physical clusters that HPC clouds have a bright future and that most claims against the use of cloud computing for HPC are exaggerations.