SUNNYVALE, Calif., Oct. 29, 2020 — The way enterprises run High Performance Computing (HPC) applications has changed. With Cloud providers offering improved security, better cost/performance, and seemingly endless compute capacity, more enterprises are turning to Cloud for their HPC workloads.

However, many companies are finding that replicating an existing on-premise HPC architecture in the Cloud does not lead to the desired breakthrough improvements. With this in mind, from day one, the UberCloud HPC Application Platform has been built with cloud computing in mind, resulting in highly increased productivity of the HPC engineers, significantly improving IT security, reducing cloud costs and administrative overhead to a minimum, and maintaining full control for engineers and corporate IT over their HPC cloud environment. Today, we are announcing UberCloud’s next-generation HPC Application Platform.

Building blocks of the UberCloud Platform, including HPC, Cloud, Containers, and Kubernetes, have been previously discussed on HPCwire: Kubernetes, Containers and HPC, and Kubernetes and HPC Applications in Hybrid Cloud Environments.

Key Stakeholders when Driving HPC Cloud Adoption

When we started designing the UberCloud HPC Application platform we recognized that three major stakeholders are crucial for the overall success of a company’s HPC cloud journey: HPC engineers, Enterprise IT, and the HPC IT team.

HPC application engineers are the driving force behind innovation. To excel in (and enjoy) their job they require a frictionless, self-service user portal for allocating the computational resources when they are required. They don’t necessarily need to understand how compute nodes, GPUs, storage, or fast network interconnects have to be configured. They expect to be able to allocate and shutdown fully configured HPC application environments.

Enterprise IT demands the necessary software tools and pre-configured containerized HPC applications for creating fully automated, completely tested environments. These environments must be suited to interact with HPC applications and their special requirements for resources and license servers. The platform needs to be pluggable to modern IT environments and support technologies like CI/CD pipelines and Kubernetes orchestration.

The HPC IT team (often quite independent from Enterprise IT) requires a hybrid cloud strategy for enhancing their existing on-premise HPC infrastructure with cloud resources for bursting and hybrid cloud scenarios. This team demands control on software versions and puts emphasis on the entire engineering lifecycle, from design to manufacturing.

Introducing the UberCloud HPC Application Platform

The UberCloud HPC Application Platform aims at supporting each of the three major key stakeholders during their HPC cloud adoption journey. How is that achieved?

For the HPC application engineers UberCloud provides a self-service HPC user interface where they select their application(s) along with the hardware parameters they need. With a single click the fully automated UberCloud HPC Application Platform allocates the dedicated computing infrastructure, deploys the application, and configures access for the engineer for instant productivity. Similarly, the HPC application infrastructure can be resized at any given point in time to run distributed memory simulations, parameter studies, or a design of experiments. After work is done the application and the simulation platform can be safely shut down.

Enterprise IT operations often have their own way of managing cloud-based resources. Infrastructure as Code, GitOps, and DevOps are some of the paradigms found in those organizations. The UberCloud HPC Application Platform contains a management tool which can be integrated in any kind of automation or CI/CD pipeline tool chains. UberCloud’s application platform management tool takes care of all aspects of managing containerized HPC applications using Kubernetes based container orchestrators like GKE, AKS, and EKS.

HPC IT teams require integration points for allocating cloud resources and distributing HPC jobs between their on-premise HPC clusters and dynamically allocated cloud resources. The UberCloud HPC Cloud Dispatcher provides batch job interfaces for hybrid cloud, cloud bursting, and high-throughput computing. It relies on open standards through the whole application stack to provide stable integration interfaces.

Putting UberCloud’s HPC Application Platform into Practice

Our first customer that enjoyed the benefits of the UberCloud HPC Application Platform is FLSmidth, a Danish multinational engineering company providing global cement and mineral industries with factories, machinery, services and know-how. The Proof of Concept implementation at the end of last year has been recently summarized here, and the extended case study (including a description of the hybrid cloud architecture) is freely available through [email protected].

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Source: UberCloud