The UberCloud HPC Experiment – Paving the way to HPC as a Service

HPC Advisory Council Switzerland Conference 2013

Example: Cloud Computing Usage in Biotech & Pharma Market Study

Insight Pharma Reports Market Study, 2012

Which cloud-based platforms is your organization using?

What do you envision your company’s biggest concerns to be on migrating your current platforms to cloud-based platforms?

Do you feel that the current vendors offer the solutions that your organization needs?

What proportion of your IT spend is devoted to Cloud Computing?

Cloud usage in Pharma/Bio, 2012

Cloud-based platform interfaces, 2012

The UberCloud HPC Experiment An open humanitarian collaborative community

Objective:

Making available HPC as a Service, for everybody, on demand, at your fingertip

How?

For SMEs and their engineering applications

to explore the end-to-end process

of using remote computing resources,

as a service, on demand, at your finger tip,

and learning how to resolve the many roadblocks.

Why this Experiment ?

Foster use of HPC in Digital Manufacturing, for 360.000 SMEs in US

By using remote resources in HPC Centers & in HPC Clouds

Support initiatives from Intel, NCMS, and many other organizations to uncover and support the ‘missing middle’

Observation: business clouds are becoming widely accepted, but acceptance of simulation clouds in industry is still in early adopter stage (CAE, Bio, Finance, Oil & Gas, DCC)

Barriers today: Complexity, IP, data transfer, software licenses, performance, specific system requirements, data security, interoperability, cost, etc.

The Industry End-User Benefits

free, on-demand access to hardware, software, and expertise, with a one stop resource shopping experience

No hunting for resources in the complex emerging cloud market

Professional match-making of end-users with service providers

Perfectly tuned end-to-end, step-by-step process to the HPC Cloud

Lowering barriers & risks for frictionless entry into HPC in the Cloud

Leading to increasing competitiveness, agility, innovation.

Crowd sourcing: End-Users are building relationships with other community members and actively contribute to improvements

No getting left behind in the emerging world of Cloud Computing

The UberCloud Advantages

HPC Experiment: growing DBase: 6 months 350 orgs and 61 teams

Resource providers: Amazon, Bull, Gompute, Penguin, Nimbix, SGI, Ohio SC, San Diego SC, Univs Indiana, Michigan, Rutgers, Stanford...

Software providers Ansys, CD-adapco, Bright Computing, CEI, CST, Cycle, ESI, Globus, NICE, OpenFoam, Simulia, Univa, etc.

Consulting: Analisis, BioTeam, Dacolt, EASi, ForTech IT, Intel, S&C, SimuTech, StillWater, VorTech, ZenoTech, Universities, etc.

Plus 60+ companies exploring and testing The UberCloud platform

Plus tools like Drive and Basecamp for hiring, matching, managing

Plus MarCom in media, media, media, media, media…

Where are we with the experiment

Started last August: Now Round 2: currently 350 participating organizations and individuals

Experiment reaches to every corner of the globe, participants are coming from 31 countries

Registration at: www.hpcexperiment.com and www.cfdexperiment.com and www.compbioexperiment.com

60 teams have been formed in Rounds 1 & 2

Round 3 in preparation, start April 1, 2013 7

Some statistics of Round 1 (completed)

160 registered participants (today: 330) from 25 countries

36 end-users, 38 experts, 20 ISVs, 17 resource providers, 20 offering edu & training, 29 ‘observers’ = 99 HPC + 61 CAE

Status of the Round 1 Teams, end of October:

15 – successfully completed in time

1 – monitoring application execution

1 – starting first job execution

3 – setting up the team (late-comers)

5 – stalled

Participants Some of our Resource Providers

Media Sponsor

Some of our Providers want to be anonymous

Participants Some of our Software Providers

Some of our ISVs want to be anonymous

Participants Some of our HPC Experts

Some of our HPC Experts want to be anonymous

… and 45 more.

Building the teams

You register as End-User, Software Provider, Resource Provider, or an Expert, and provide your profile

End-User joins the experiment; we ask the ISV to join

We select a suitable Team Expert from our database

End-User and Expert analyze resource requirements

We suggest a computational Resource Provider

After all four team members agree, the team is ready to go

Teams, it’s all about teams 20 teams from Round 1:

Anchor Bolt

Resonance

Radiofrequency

Supersonic

Liquid-Gas

Wing-Flow

Ship-Hull

Cement Flow

Sprinkler

Space Capsule

Car Acoustics

Dosimetry

Weathermen

Wind Turbines

Combustion

Blood Flow

ChinaCFD

Gas Bubbles

Side impact

ColombiaBio

Teams in Round 2

Simulating stent deployment Ventilation benchmark - Simulating free convection in a room Two-phase flow simulation of a separation column CFD simulations of vertical and horizontal wind turbines Remote Visualization Simulating acoustic field around a person's head (near-field HRTF) Drifting snow in urban environments and on building rooftops Simulation of flow around a hull of the ship Simulating steel to concrete fastening capacity for an anchor bolt Simulating water flow through an irrigation water sprinkler Numerical EMC and Dosimetry with high-resolution models Ensemble simulation of weather at 20km and higher resolution Simulating radial and axial fan performance Gas turbine gas dilution analysis Simulating wind tunnel flow around bicycle and rider Interactive Genomic Data Analysis in the Cloud

Team 41: Heavy Duty ABAQUS Structural Analysis in the Cloud

The Team: Frank Ding, Simpson Strong-Tie; Matt Dunbar, SIMULIA; Steve Hebert, Nimbix; Sharan Kalwani, Intel

The application: solving anchorage tensile capacity, steel and wood connector load capacity, and special moment frame cyclic pushover

The Use Case:

ABAQUS/Explicit and ABAQUS/Standard

HPC cluster at Simpson Strong-Tie is modest, 32 cores Intel x86-based gear

Cloud bursting is critical

Sudden large data transfers are a challenge

Need to perform visualization for ensuring design simulation is proceeding correctly

Pre-processing happens on the end user’s local workstation to prepare the CAE model

Files transferred to the HPC cloud data staging area, using a secured FTP process

Submit the job through the Nimbix.net web portal

Once the job finishes, a notification email is received

Result files can be transferred back for post-processing,

or the post-processing can be done using remote desktop tool like HP RGS on the HPC provider’s visualization node.

Team 41: The HPC Cloud workflow

Team 41: Challenges

Scheduling a weekly meeting – the Experiment is not our day job

Needed a fast interconnect (e.g. Infiniband) which was not available.

Solved with “fat” nodes, sufficient for testing out the cloud HPC workflow, the actual inter-connect performance of the cluster was not a concern.

Challenge was to address the need for simple and secure file storage and transfer. Accomplished by using GLOBUS technology. Cloud based storage is mature and ready for prime time HPC, especially in the CAE arena.

Challenge was to push the limits and stream several jobs simultaneously to the remote HPC cloud resource. This provided solid evidence that “bursting” was indeed feasible. To the whole team’s surprise it worked admirably and had no impact whatsoever overall.

Challenge now became perhaps the most critical which was the end user perception and acceptance of the cloud as a smooth part of the workflow.

Remote viz was necessary to see if the simulation results (remotely in the cloud) could be viewed and manipulated as if it were local on the end user desktop.

Team 41. What the end user saw…..

With right tuning and useful remote visualization!

Team 41: What did we all learn and prove?

Benefits:

Clearly established - HPC cloud model can indeed be made to work.

Recommendations: A few key necessary factors emerged:

Result file transfers are a major source of concern since most CAE result files can be easily over several gigabytes Depending upon the individual use, a minimum of 2-4 MB/sec sustained and delivered bandwidth is necessary

The same applies when doing remote visualizations, in this case, 4 MB/sec is the threshold Latency is also a key concern.

Beyond the Cloud service provider, a network savvy ISP is perhaps a necessary part of the team of infrastructure in order to deliver robust and production like HPC cloud

Remote visualization provides a convenient collaboration platform for a CAE analyst to access the analysis results any where he has the need, but it requires a secure “behind the firewall” remote workspace

Bumps on the road

Time delays: Vacation times in August; everybody has a day job

No standards: Access and usage processes of hw & sw providers are different, some complex

Hands-on: Process automation at our providers vary greatly.

Lack of automation: Currently the end-to-end process is manual (intentionally).

Participants spent only small portion of their time, some are responsive, others are not: it is not their day job!

Getting regular updates from Team Experts is a challenge because this is not their day job !

Are we discovering hurdles?

Reaching out to industry end-users who are ready and willing to engage in HPC and especially HPC as a Service

About half of our participants want to remain anonymous, for different reasons (policies, internal processes, failure…)

HPC is complex; at times it requires multiple experts

Matching participants is critical to a team’s success

Resource providers (e.g. HPC Centers) often face internal policies, legal hurdles, licenses,…

Barriers: Complexity, IP, data transfer, software licenses, performance, specific system requirements, security, interoperability, cost, etc.

Now Planning the UberCloud Round 3

April – June 2013

Expecting 500 organizations, ready for 40 more teams

More professional, more automation, more user-friendly

Extending applications: HPC, CAE, Life Sciences, Big Data

Better guidance: 25-steps end-to-end process

Better Basecamp ‘team rooms’ for collaboration

Growing the UberCloud Exhibit services directory

3-level support: front line (within a team), 2nd level (UberCloud Mentors), 3rd level (software & hardware providers)

Introducing the first commercial brokerage services, for a fee

Why would you want to join?

HPC as a Service is the next big thing, great benefits are looking for you

HPC is complex; together it is easier to tackle the complexity

Low entry barrier to HPC as a Service through an experiment

Learning by doing; experimenting with no risk; no failure

Becoming an active part of this growing community

Exploring the end-to-end process and learning how this fits into your research and/or business direction in the near future

Star Trek in the UberCloud

Commander Burak

Commander Wolfgang

@ Intel’s Star Trek Booth at SC’12

Thank You http://www.hpcexperiment.com

http://www.cfdexperiment.com

http://www.compbioexperiment.com

http://www.bigdataexperiment.com