Running a pre-exascale, geographically distributed, multi-cloud scientific simulation

Abstract

As we approach the Exascale era, it is important to verify that the existing frameworks and tools will still work at that scale. Moreover, public Cloud computing has been emerging as a viable solution for both prototyping and urgent computing. Using the elasticity of the Cloud, we have thus put in place a pre-exascale HTCondor setup for running a scientific simulation in the Cloud, with the chosen application being IceCube’s photon propagation simulation. I.e. this was not a purely demonstration run, but it was also used to produce valuable and much needed scientific results for the IceCube collaboration. In order to reach the desired scale, we aggregated GPU resources across 8 GPU models from many geographic regions across Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and the Google Cloud Platform. Using this setup, we reached a peak of over 51k GPUs corresponding to almost 380 PFLOP32s, for a total integrated compute of about 100k GPU hours. In this paper we provide the description of the setup, the problems that were discovered and overcome, as well as a short description of the actual science output of the exercise.