Challenges of running high performance computing applications in the cloud

During the ISC Cloud’11 event Wolfgang Gentzsch lead a panel discussion with Kenichi Miura, Per Oster and Tom-Michael Thamm to offer insights into advantages and challenges of running high performance computing (HPC) applications in the cloud.

The panel members listed a few real world challenges of running HPC applications in the cloud:

Cloud offers have trouble matching performance of purpose built HPC clusters
The cost savings aren’t guaranteed – especially due to data transfer/storage costs
Data transfer speeds can be prohibitive
Security is a concern in public clouds

The panel also comments that cloud technologies should be complimentary and not a replacement to the HPC.

Giants joining to fight Amazon’s Cloud?

Today OASIS announced that it’s launched an open standards initiative to enhance the portability of cloud services.

OASIS listed a number of well known names as co-authors of the initial draft of the standard: Capgemini, CA Technologies, Cisco, Citrix, EMC, IBM, NetApp, PwC, Red Hat, SAP AG, Software AG, Virtunomic, and WSO2.

What surprised some isn’t necessarily whose name is on the list of early contributors, but really whose isn’t. Most notable are cloud provider tech super powers: Amazon and Microsoft.

“Amazon’s absence is less surprising: Amazon has the dominant cloud platform, but it isn’t built on standards, so customers can’t always just pick up their applications and plop them into another cloud.” Julie Bort explains in her post titled “Tech Giants Join Forces To Fight Amazon’s Cloud”.

Although it’s early in the game and there is much work to do the OASIS initiative will add to fuel to the fire to define standards for cloud services. Will be interesting to follow how Amazon and other providers react.

Sources:
Julie Bort’s (@Julie188) post in businessinsider.com

Press release at oasis-open.org