SC10: Fast-Moving Data Clouds Pass through the City of Jazz
Clouds Bursting at the Seams
Just as SC10 is underway, Platform Computing, which specializes in cluster, grid, and cloud management, issued a white paper titled “High Performance Computing in the Cloud” (November 2010). Fusing premonition and admonition, the paper’s tag line warns we must “[Prepare] for the inevitable.”
Cloud-hosted HPC is inevitable for one simple fact: cost effectiveness. “When IT departments buy, build, and maintain clusters to handle peak loads it can be expensive, time consuming, and wasteful. Compute environments designed for peak loads often see utilization rates drop with idle compute resources when the project that created the spike is complete,” the paper points out.
