Constructing virtual private supercomputer using virtualization and cloud technologies

Abstract

One of efficient ways to conduct experiments on HPC platforms is to create custom virtual computing environments tailored to the requirements of users and their applications. In this paper we investigate virtual private supercomputer, an approach based on virtualization, data consolidation, and cloud technologies. Virtualization is used to abstract applications from underlying hardware and operating system while data consolidation is applied to store data in a distributed storage system. Both virtualization and data consolidation layers offer APIs for distributed computations and data processing. Combined, these APIs shift the focus from supercomputing technologies to problems being solved. Based on these concepts, we propose an approach to construct virtual clusters with help of cloud computing technologies to be used as on-demand private supercomputers and evaluate performance of this solution. © 2014 Springer International Publishing.