High Performance Computing in the Cloud: A Survey on Performance and Usability

This book chapter gives an overview about High Performance Computing in the Cloud. Therefore, various aspects have been highlighted, reaching from technologies to achieve this goal up to different kinds of service operation models and in addition, general obstacles that have to be overcome. Especially three different types of architecture models have been presented and discussed: Cloud-like access to HPC resources, Hybrid HPC/Cloud architectures as well as full virtualization of HPC clusters. For the latter case, a test system has been installed in order to provide real-world measurements to understand the performance and flexibility implications. These measurements have been discussed and evaluated and it has been shown, that the trade-off between user and application requirements finally decides the optimal architecture for the execution.