Usability Evaluation of Cloud for HPC Applications

TL;DR

This paper evaluates the usability of cloud platforms for HPC applications by testing 11 applications across multiple clouds and configurations, providing insights and best practices for cloud-based HPC workloads.

Contribution

It offers a comprehensive cross-platform usability study of HPC applications on major cloud providers, including scaling tests and methodological guidance.

Findings

Cloud environments can scale HPC applications up to 28,672 CPUs and 256 GPUs.

Performance and usability vary across cloud providers and configurations.

The study establishes a foundation for best practices in cloud-based HPC computing.

Abstract

The rise of AI and the economic dominance of cloud computing have created a new nexus of innovation for high performance computing (HPC), which has a long history of driving scientific discovery. In addition to performance needs, scientific workflows increasingly demand capabilities of cloud environments: portability, reproducibility, dynamism, and automation. As converged cloud environments emerge, there is growing need to study their fit for HPC use cases. Here we present a cross-platform usability study that assesses 11 different HPC proxy applications and benchmarks across three clouds (Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, and Google Cloud), six environments, and two compute configurations (CPU and GPU) against on-premises HPC clusters at a major center. We perform scaling tests of applications in all environments up to 28,672 CPUs and 256 GPUs. We present methodology and results to guide future study and provide a foundation to define best practices for running HPC workloads in cloud.