Traditional HPC （High Performance Computing） cluster is built on top of physical machines. It is usually not practical to reassign these machines to other tasks due to the fact that software installation is time con...Traditional HPC （High Performance Computing） cluster is built on top of physical machines. It is usually not practical to reassign these machines to other tasks due to the fact that software installation is time consuming. As a result, these machines are usually dedicated for the cluster usage. Virtualization technology provides an abstract layer which allows several different operating systems （with different software packages） running on top of one physical machine. Cloud computing provides an easy way for the user to manage and interact with the computing resources （the virtual machines in this case）. In this work, we demonstrate the feasibility of building a cloud-based cluster for HPC on top of a set of desktop computers that are interconnected by means of Fast Ethernet. Our cluster has several advantages. For instance, the deployment time of the cluster is quite fast： We need only 5 min to deploy a cluster of 30 machines, Besides, several performance benchmarks have been carried out. As expected, the embarrassingly parallel problem has the linear relationship between the performance and the cluster size.展开更多
文摘Traditional HPC （High Performance Computing） cluster is built on top of physical machines. It is usually not practical to reassign these machines to other tasks due to the fact that software installation is time consuming. As a result, these machines are usually dedicated for the cluster usage. Virtualization technology provides an abstract layer which allows several different operating systems （with different software packages） running on top of one physical machine. Cloud computing provides an easy way for the user to manage and interact with the computing resources （the virtual machines in this case）. In this work, we demonstrate the feasibility of building a cloud-based cluster for HPC on top of a set of desktop computers that are interconnected by means of Fast Ethernet. Our cluster has several advantages. For instance, the deployment time of the cluster is quite fast： We need only 5 min to deploy a cluster of 30 machines, Besides, several performance benchmarks have been carried out. As expected, the embarrassingly parallel problem has the linear relationship between the performance and the cluster size.
