Hopes and facts in evaluating the performance of HPC-I/O on a cloud environment

Abstract

Currently, there is an increasing interest about the cloud platform by the High Performance Computing (HPC) community, and the Parallel I/O for High Performance Systems is not an exception. In cloud platforms, the user takes into account not only the execution time but also the cost, because the cost can be one of the most important issue. In this paper, we propose a methodology to quickly evaluate the performance and cost of Virtual Clusters for parallel scientific application that uses parallel I/O. From the parallel application I/O model automatically extracted with our tool PAS2P-IO, we obtain the I/O requirements and then the user can select the Virtual Cluster that meets the application requirements. The application I/O model does not depend on the underlying I/O system. One of the main benefits of applying our methodology is that it is not necessary to execute the application to select the Virtual Cluster on cloud. Finally, costs and performance-cost ratio for the Virtual Clusters are provided to facilitate the decision making on the selection of resources on a cloud platform.