Providing a Cloud Network Infrastructure on a Supercomputer

Supercomputers and clouds both strive to make a large number of computing cores available for computation. More recently, similar objectives such as low-power, manageability at scale, and low cost of ownership are driving a more converged hardware and software. Challenges remain, however, of which one is that current cloud infrastructure does not yield the performance sought by many scientific applications. A source of the performance loss comes from virtualization and virtualization of the network in particular. This paper provides an introduction and analysis of a hybrid supercomputer software infrastructure, which allows direct hardware access to the communication hardware for the necessary components while providing the standard elastic cloud infrastructure for other components.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2010
• Where: ScienceCloud
• Authors: J. Appavoo, V. Uhlig, A. Waterland, B. Rosenburg, D. Da Silva, R. Wisniewski, E. Van Hensbergen, J. Stoess, U. Steinberg
• Keywords: Cloud, Ibm, Kittyhawk, L4, Linux, Plan 9, SCIENCECLOUD 2010, Supercomputing