Dynamic reconfiguration of computer platforms at the hardware device level for high performance computing infrastructure as a service

Abstract

Users’ needs and requirements for high performance computing (HPC) has become increasingly diversified. As user needs become increasingly diverse, it becomes increasingly difficult to own high-performance computing platforms themselves and the HPC platform provider are required to provide computing platforms to execute diverse applications. In this paper, we propose a computer architecture for providing HPC infrastructure dynamically and promptly as a cloud computing service in response to users’ request for computing platforms. In order to gain flexibility to accommodate various HPC jobs with application specific computing platforms, the proposed system reconfigures a software and hardware platform by utilizing the synergy of Open Grid Scheduler/Grid Engine and OpenStack. The experimental system developed in this research shows the high flexibility of hardware platform reconfiguration and the high performance of Spark’s benchmark application. In addition, our simulation evaluation shows that dynamic reconfigurable hardware cluster system can improve hardware resource utility rate, and also eliminating the worst case of resource congestion in the real-world operational record of our university’s computer center during the first half of 2016.