Scientific Computing in the Cloud

TL;DR

This paper explores the potential of using cloud computing for high-performance scientific research, demonstrating its feasibility and advantages over traditional hardware through preliminary tests on specific scientific codes.

Contribution

It presents an initial evaluation of cloud computing for scientific applications, highlighting its benefits and performance considerations for research and development.

Findings

Cloud computing offers reliable, high-performance resources for scientific research.

Preliminary tests show feasible CPU and network performance for scientific codes.

Virtualization simplifies environment control and code deployment.

Abstract

We investigate the feasibility of high performance scientific computation using cloud computers as an alternative to traditional computational tools. The availability of these large, virtualized pools of compute resources raises the possibility of a new compute paradigm for scientific research with many advantages. For research groups, cloud computing provides convenient access to reliable, high performance clusters and storage, without the need to purchase and maintain sophisticated hardware. For developers, virtualization allows scientific codes to be optimized and pre-installed on machine images, facilitating control over the computational environment. Preliminary tests are presented for serial and parallelized versions of the widely used x-ray spectroscopy and electronic structure code FEFF on the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, including CPU and network performance.