The benefits and challenges of vHPC and cloud computing (abstract only)

While interest in using virtualization for HPC is increasing, this trend is mostly being driven by the community's desire to access self-provisioned, on-demand and elastic compute resources in the cloud. In this context, virtualization is often viewed simply as a tax that must be paid to use cloud resources. However, organizations with prior (Enterprise) virtualization experience have a different perspective. In this talk will discuss what specific benefits these organizations expect to gain by virtualizing their HPC workloads. Balancing these benefits, we will then turn to a discussion of the challenges that must be overcome to broaden the applicability of virtualization for HPC.