HPC in the cloud comes of ageMartin Hamilton
1HPC in the cloud comes of age - Red Oak Seminar - September 201713/09/2017
HPC in the cloud comes of age
1. The journey to cloud HPC
2. UK national e-Infrastructure survey
› 2017 survey results sneak preview
3. What’s next?
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About Jisc
» Not-for-profit company serving the HE, FE and skills community:
› 18 million users of shared services like Janet, eduroam,JiscMail, shared data centres
› Devising national deals with IT vendors and publishers, e.g. routers and switches framework, AWS
› Providing advice & guidance to the sector on digital technologies in research and education
» My role:
› Leading a small group exploring emerging technologies like Augmented Reality and brain computer interfaces
› Helping institutions devise/implement digital strategies and building evidence base around new technologies
› Working with e-Infrastructure community via Project Directors Group (formerly ran HPC Midlands for EPSRC)
3HPC in the cloud comes of age - Red Oak Seminar - September 201713/09/2017
» Not-for-profit company serving the HE, FE and skills community:
› 18 million users of shared services like Janet, eduroam,JiscMail, shared data centres
› Devising national deals with IT vendors and publishers, e.g. routers and switches framework
› Providing advice & guidance to the sector on digital technologies in research and education
» My role:
› Leading a small group exploring emerging technologies like Augmented Reality and brain computer interfaces
› Helping institutions devise/implement digital strategies and building evidence base around new technologies
› Working with e-Infrastructure community via Project Directors Group (formerly ran HPC Midlands for EPSRC)
About Jisc
4HPC in the cloud comes of age - Red Oak Seminar - September 201713/09/2017
» Not-for-profit company serving the HE, FE and skills community:
› 18 million users of shared services like Janet, eduroam,JiscMail, shared data centres
› Devising national deals with IT vendors and publishers, e.g. routers and switches framework
› Providing advice & guidance to the sector on digital technologies in research and education
» My role:
› Leading a small group exploring emerging technologies like Augmented Reality and brain computer interfaces
› Helping institutions devise/implement digital strategies and building evidence base around new technologies
› Working with e-Infrastructure community via Project Directors Group (formerly ran HPC Midlands for EPSRC)
About Jisc
5HPC in the cloud comes of age - Red Oak Seminar - September 201713/09/2017
1. The journey to cloud HPC
13/09/2017 HPC in the cloud comes of age - Red Oak Seminar - September 2017 6
The journey to cloud HPC
How we got here, part 1:
» Historically software was typicallywritten using high performancelanguages like Fortran and C
» …but workflows would often combineseveral of these tools using scriptinglanguages like Python
» The results were often quite brittle anddifficult to transport from one machineto another - e.g. version dependencies
» Meanwhile virtualisation techniques had been making a resurgence in enterprise IT and quickly became standard operating procedure for devops
» Computer Science community initiatives like Research Object spring up…
7HPC in the cloud comes of age - Red Oak Seminar - September 201713/09/2017
http://www.researchobject.org
The journey to cloud HPC
How we got here, part 2:
» The virtual machine image became thecommon unit of currency for enterpriseprivate clouds (e.g. VMWare) and publicclouds (Azure, AWS, etc)
» VM catalogues available from publiccloud providers like AWS Marketplace+ community initiatives like Bio-Linux
» Growing popularity of orchestration toolslike Ansible, Vagrant and Puppet
» But HPC sysadmins reluctant to provideVM environment on their machines
› Performance impact? For everyone?
8HPC in the cloud comes of age - Red Oak Seminar - September 201713/09/2017
http://environmentalomics.org/
The journey to cloud HPC
How we got here, part 3:
» But not all jobs are pedal-to-the-metal,requiring maximum machine performance
» Lots of HPC (and HTC, and…) users simplywant to run a particular app, and are ecstaticif it’s faster than on their laptop
» HPC providers initially dubious that a cloudenvironment could be superimposed,but then…
› Growing popularity of OpenStack asan underpinning in-house platform
› Creation of VM oriented private clouds
› Growing acceptability of public clouds
9HPC in the cloud comes of age - Red Oak Seminar - September 201713/09/2017
http://www.jasmin.ac.uk/
2. UK national e-Infrastructure survey
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UK national e-Infrastructure survey
11HPC in the cloud comes of age - Red Oak Seminar - September 201713/09/2017
2017 survey report being developed
Previous survey reports available from www.hpc-sig.org
UK national e-Infrastructure survey
12HPC in the cloud comes of age - Red Oak Seminar - September 201713/09/2017
Aberystwyth UniversityCardiff UniversityDiRAC HPC FacilityDiamond Light Source LtdDurham UniversityEMBL-European Bioinformatics InstituteEdinburgh Parallel Computing Centre (EPCC)eMedLabFrancis Crick InstituteGridPPHPC Midlands+Hartree CentreInstitute of Cancer ResearchKing's College LondonLancaster UniversityLoughborough UniversityMRC Laboratory of Molecular BiologyN8HPCNewcastle UniversityNorwich BioScience Institutes (NBI)Queens University of BelfastScience and Technology Facilities Council (STFC)Supercomputing WalesSwansea University
University College LondonUniversity of BathUniversity of BirminghamUniversity of BristolUniversity of CambridgeUniversity of DundeeUniversity of EdinburghUniversity of GlasgowUniversity of HullUniversity of LeedsUniversity of LeicesterUniversity of LiverpoolUniversity of ManchesterUniversity of NottinghamUniversity of OxfordUniversity of PortsmouthUniversity of SheffieldUniversity of SouthamptonUniversity of St AndrewsUniversity of StrathclydeUniversity of SussexUniversity of WarwickUniversity of YorkWellcome Trust Centre for Human GeneticsWellcome Trust Sanger Institute
2017 survey respondents
UK national e-Infrastructure survey
13HPC in the cloud comes of age - Red Oak Seminar - September 201713/09/2017
Word cloud of NeI service descriptions
UK national e-Infrastructure survey
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Relationship with REF Units of Assessment
UK national e-Infrastructure survey
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UK national e-Infrastructure survey
17HPC in the cloud comes of age - Red Oak Seminar - September 201713/09/2017
UK national e-Infrastructure survey
UK national e-Infrastructure survey
18HPC in the cloud comes of age - Red Oak Seminar - September 201713/09/2017
UK national e-Infrastructure survey
19HPC in the cloud comes of age - Red Oak Seminar - September 201713/09/2017
UK national e-Infrastructure survey
20HPC in the cloud comes of age - Red Oak Seminar - September 201713/09/2017
3. What’s next?
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What’s next?
» Hyperscale cloud providers offering:
› Performant interconnects, e.g. Azure RDMA
› Latest hardware, e.g. Azure FPGAs+ “very fat nodes”
› Azure ExpressRoute + AWS Direct Connectpeerings (Jisc facilitating)
» Some consolidation of private clouds intodomain / community facilities, e.g. CLIMB
› Authorisation / access challenges(Jisc Assent + Safe Share)
» Containers gradually take over from VM images- cf. Open Containers Initiative
› Do we need a clearinghouse, or will GitHub do? (for open source)
22HPC in the cloud comes of age - Red Oak Seminar - September 201713/09/2017
https://www.opencontainers.org
Continue the conversation…
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Except where otherwise noted, this work is licensed under CC-BY
Martin HamiltonFuturist, Jisc
HPC in the cloud comes of age - Red Oak Seminar - September 201713/09/2017