1. Elastic HPC Extending the Cluster into the Cloud Ruth Lynch, Research IT Service 13 th November 2009

2. HPC in UCD Research IT Service 2005 HPC is Core Service Phaeton Cluster - Community & Shared Services 11% ICHEC Stokes Cluster 2008

3. What's the problem? Physical HPC Cluster is inelastic Users sometimes need more resources than are available Adding resources can be a slow process Capital intensive process

4. Possible Solutions "Pre-order" hardware Buy compute time on other facilities Investigate "The Cloud"

5. Which Cloud? Cloud options Locations Different definitions "a style of computing where massively scalable IT enabled capabilities are delivered 'as a service' to external customers using Internet technologies" - Gartner Inc.

6. Getting on the Cloud Amazon Web Services No technical issues How to pay for the services? Credit Card? Prepaid credit card? Prepay for Amazon credit? Get billed by Amazon?.......

7. All Aboard the Cloud Contacted Amazon Applied for a research grant with Amazon Got a small grant Started building...

8. Technical Specifications Compute Nodes Up to 20 x Large Instances AMD Opteron 2218 HE 4 vCPU Cores 7GB of RAM CentOS 5.2 On Demand

9. Security Users authenticate through Phaeton Login Node LDAP Authentication Encrypted Communications 128 bit AES encryption for the data link 160 bit SHA1 checksum for both the data and control channels

10. Management Cloud Nodes are managed by Phaeton Head Node MOAB from Adaptive Computing / Torque Specific queue for cloud based resources

11. Data Concerns Data Protection Laws Data Transfer Rules Intellectual Property Laws Data Privacy

12. Data Concerns Amazon gives choice of location EU-WEST-1A & EU-WEST-1B Data not "stored" in the cloud Computation only in the cloud UCD Campus AWS

13. Computational Results Real users with real jobs Results dependent on job and user type

14. What else? AMD vs INTEL Licensing Tuning Cost comparison Currently appears more expensive than local resources Approx. 9,500 per month for AWS Costs have recently fallen

15. The Benefits Immediately available resources "Once off" usage charge for resources Relatively quick to set up Easy to maintain Viable option for occasional large scale single jobs

16. Future Plans UCD Cloud Incorporating existing local resources Access to multiple public cloud resources Seamless service provision Automated cloud bursting

17. Thanks to... Amazon Kurt Messersmith Iain Galvin UCD Research IT Team Research Community Lukasz Szmit

18. Thank You Ruth.Lynch@ucd.ie http://www.ucd.ie/itservices/researchit/