Energy-aware provisioning of HPC services through virtualised Web services

Abstract

In this chapter we present a support infrastructure for Virtual Organisations allowing for complex IT service products delivery and distribution in a controlled yet open way. The provision of services under such paradigms usually requires a specialised environment and knowledge base and tools. In particular, in HPC (High Performance Computing) environments, a detailed knowledge of the available systems and of their behaviour and performances is of essential importance since it offers a way to avoid the downgrade of performances and the related increase of costs. Furthermore, HPC environments are characterised by a very high demand of energy. However, most users of such infrastructures are not aware of the technologies they are using, enforcing the involvement of according experts in order to avoid a non-optimal usage of the resources, and thus a waste of time, energy and money. We show examples of such a complex IT product by describing a sample process in the field of medical computation - cancellous bone simulation - and illustrate how such a complex product can be provided in an easy-to-use and energy-efficient fashion via a service virtualisation infrastructure. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2013.