[Gllug] Cloud computing ( was Re: Linux Petition )

[John Hearns]

On 24/04/2012, JLMS <jjllmmss at googlemail.com> wrote:
> On 23 April 2012 09:23, Tethys <sta296 at astradyne.co.uk> wrote:
>
> You can also use  thousands of cores to throw at a problem for a few
> thousand pounds instead of expending hundreds of thousands or even
> millions of pounds on a system of comparable power.


I very much agree with you there.
Especially in the biosciences market, cloud is being pushed as a
solution for problems like gene sequencing.
As a for instance, see this article on a 50 000 core machine which was
assembled as a demo on Amazon:

http://www.hpcinthecloud.com/hpccloud/2012-04-24/cycle_spins_up_50_000-core_cluster_in_amazon_cloud.html

Cloud also is very good for companies which have a 'bursty' workload.
You might have workstations and storage within your company, and the
software packages you need to do some design or simulation work. When
your consultancy wins a contract to (say) simulate vehicle crashes you
could hire cloud resources to do that.
Software vendors are already providing on-demand licenses which can be
accessed via a web server and a key, rather than the tradiational
model of running a Flexlm server within your company (yes, I know you
can VPN tunnel etc.)
I can think of one well-known company based in west London which does
just this sort of on-demand licensing.

Also re. assembling supercomputers on the cloud, I was very impressed
by a short talk from Amazon at the Intel Sandybridge launch in London.
They now provide large machine instances with a 10 gigabit connection,
which you need if you are going to run parallel MPI type codes across
many systems.
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