Cloud computing typically provides virtualized environments with advantages ranging from cost savings to resource pooling. However, a high performance computing (HPC) cloud that supports technical computing and analysis workloads must provide a flexible environment that will allow HPC applications to achieve petascale performance not normally associated with cloud computing.
While virtual machines may provide sufficient performance for typical applications, the IBM HPC Management Suite for Cloud lets compute-intensive workloads utilize the power of non-virtualized bare metal. The suite provides a private HPC cloud using tools familiar to the HPC community. Closest to a conventional HPC cluster in terms of infrastructure ownership and security, a private cloud offers the added benefits of a flexible infrastructure, lower capital expenditures and metered usage.
The HPC Management Suite for Cloud has tools that provide rapid, diskless provisioning of a variety of operating system images to bare metal and virtual machines, and can also create and manage virtual machines on hypervisors like a Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM). It supports cloud features, such as dynamic set up of virtual private clusters, capturing running images from physical and virtual machines, and energy management. A web portal enables ease-of-access to the HPC environment for administrators and users.
This comprehensive suite of tools:
- Provisions bare metal high performance compute clusters for technical computing and analysis workloads.
- Consolidates the infrastructure for efficient sharing of HPC resources.
- Accesses the HPC infrastructure through an on-demand, self-service web portal optimized for HPC users and administrators.
- Achieves rapid image deployment and resource management using diskless provisioning.
- Centralizes user and energy management, usage metering and accounting.