Abstract
There are many scientific applications that have high performance computing (HPC) demands. Such demands are traditionally supported by cluster- or Grid-based systems. Cloud computing, which has experienced a tremendous growth, emerged as an approach to provide on-demand access to computing resources. The cloud computing paradigm offers a number of advantages over other distributed platforms. For example, the access to resources is flexible and cost-effective since it is not necessary to invest a large amount of money on a computing infrastructure nor pay salaries for maintenance functions. Therefore, the possibility of using cloud computing for running high performance computing applications is attractive. However, it has been shown elsewhere that current cloud computing platforms are not suitable for running some of these kinds of applications since the performance offered is very poor. The reason is mainly the overhead from virtualisation which is extensively used by most cloud computing platforms as a means to optimise resource usage. Furthermore, running HPC applications in current cloud platforms is a complex task that in many cases requires configuring a cluster of virtual machines (VMs). In this paper, we present a lightweight virtualisation approach for efficiently running the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model (a computing- and communication-intensive application) in a cloud computing environment. Our approach also provides a higher-level programming model that automates the process of configuring a cluster of VMs. We assume such a cloud environment can be shared with other types of HPC applications such as mpiBLAST (an embarrassingly parallel application), and MiniFE (a memory-intensive application). Our experimental results show that lightweight virtualisation imposes about 5 % overhead and it substantially outperforms traditional heavyweight virtualisation such as KVM.
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Notes
Currently, access to our WRF Web Portal is only provided to Mexican meteorologists that request an account.
This situation does not hold in some of our experimental scenarios in which some Cgroups have bound more than two processes in order to perform CPU stress tests. Also, there are certain HPC applications that require running more than one process per VM. For instance, mpiBLAST requires at least 3 processes per VM in our experimental setup.
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Acknowledgments
Hector A. Duran-Limon would like to thank the State Council of Science and Technology of the State of Jalisco (COECYTJAL) (grant 495-2008), IBM (Faculty Award 2008), RedesClim-CONACYT, and the Mexican’s Public Education Ministry (grant PROMEP-Thematic Networks of Collaboration, call 2011) for supporting this work. Ming Zhao’s research is sponsored by National Science Foundation under grant CCF-0938045 and Department of Homeland Security under grant 2010-ST-062-000039. This work is part of the Latin American Grid (LA Grid) initiative (LA Grid 2013). We also thank Erick Corona for his valuable work to carry out some of the experiments. The authors are also thankful to the anonymous reviewers for their useful comments. Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the sponsors.
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Communicated by: H. A. Babaie
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Duran-Limon, H.A., Flores-Contreras, J., Parlavantzas, N. et al. Efficient execution of the WRF model and other HPC applications in the cloud. Earth Sci Inform 9, 365–382 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12145-016-0253-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12145-016-0253-7