Best Practices for HPC Workloads on Public Cloud Platforms A guide for computational scientists to use public cloud for HPC workloads

Abstract

HPC (high performance computing) applications come with a variety of requirements for computation, communication, and storage; and many of these requirements can be met with commodity technology available in public clouds. In this article, we report on results for several well-known HPC applications on IBM public cloud, and we describe best practices for running such applications on cloud systems in general. Our results show that public clouds are not only ready for HPC workloads, but they can provide performance comparable to, and in some cases better than, current supercomputers.