HPC in the cloud comes of age - Red Oak HPC Seminar

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?

13/09/2017 HPC in the cloud comes of age - Red Oak Seminar - September 2017 2

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)




› Devising national deals with IT vendors and publishers, e.g. routers and switches framework


» My role:




About Jisc




› Devising national deals with IT vendors and publishers, e.g. routers and switches framework


» My role:




About Jisc


1. The journey to cloud HPC


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…


http://www.researchobject.org

http://www.researchobject.org/



» 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?


http://environmentalomics.org/

http://environmentalomics.org/



» 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


http://www.jasmin.ac.uk/

http://www.jasmin.ac.uk/

2. UK national e-Infrastructure survey


UK national e-Infrastructure survey


2017 survey report being developed

Previous survey reports available from www.hpc-sig.org

http://www.hpc-sig.org/



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



Word cloud of NeI service descriptions



Relationship with REF Units of Assessment













3. What’s next?


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)


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

@[email protected]

HPC in the cloud comes of age - Red Oak Seminar - September 201713/09/2017