The Case for Non-Volatile RAM in Cloud HPCaaS

TL;DR

This paper argues that integrating Non-Volatile RAM into cloud HPC services can significantly improve scalability and cost-effectiveness for large-scale applications with high interprocessor communication.

Contribution

It introduces the idea that NVRAM can enhance HPCaaS scalability and cost-efficiency, providing a new hardware approach for cloud-based high-performance computing.

Findings

NVRAM can enable scaling of HPC applications by an order of magnitude.

NVRAM integration can reduce penalties associated with network latencies.

Using NVRAM can be cost-effective for both users and providers.

Abstract

HPC as a service (HPCaaS) is a new way to expose HPC resources via cloud services. However, continued effort to port large-scale tightly coupled applications with high interprocessor communication to multiple (and many) nodes synchronously, as in on-premise supercomputers, is still far from satisfactory due to network latencies. As a consequence, in said cases, HPCaaS is recommended to be used with one or few instances. In this paper we take the claim that new piece of memory hardware, namely Non-Volatile RAM (NVRAM), can allow such computations to scale up to an order of magnitude with marginalized penalty in comparison to RAM. Moreover, we suggest that the introduction of NVRAM to HPCaaS can be cost-effective to the users and the suppliers in numerous forms.