VM-MAD: a cloud/cluster software for service-oriented academic environments

TL;DR

This paper introduces VM-MAD, an open source framework that enables cloudbursting of HPC clusters into IaaS clouds, allowing flexible, tested, and dynamic resource extension for computational workloads.

Contribution

The paper presents a modular, configurable cloudbursting orchestrator that can be tested via simulation and applied in real-world environments to enhance HPC workload processing.

Findings

Effective cloudbursting to Amazon EC2 demonstrated

Flexible configuration and testing of policies enabled

Significant speed-up in protein data analysis workflows

Abstract

The availability of powerful computing hardware in IaaS clouds makes cloud computing attractive also for computational workloads that were up to now almost exclusively run on HPC clusters. In this paper we present the VM-MAD Orchestrator software: an open source framework for cloudbursting Linux-based HPC clusters into IaaS clouds but also computational grids. The Orchestrator is completely modular, allowing flexible configurations of cloudbursting policies. It can be used with any batch system or cloud infrastructure, dynamically extending the cluster when needed. A distinctive feature of our framework is that the policies can be tested and tuned in a simulation mode based on historical or synthetic cluster accounting data. In the paper we also describe how the VM-MAD Orchestrator was used in a production environment at the FGCZ to speed up the analysis of mass spectrometry-based protein data by cloudbursting to the Amazon EC2. The advantages of this hybrid system are shown with a large evaluation run using about hundred large EC2 nodes.