Authors:
Lukasz Miroslaw
;
Michael Pantic
and
Henrik Nordborg
Affiliation:
HSR Hochschule Rapperswil, Switzerland
Keyword(s):
Microsoft Azure, High Performance Computing, Cloud Computing, Cloud Orchestrator, Computational Fluid Dynamics, Simulations.
Abstract:
The demand for computational power and storage in industry and academia is continuously increasing. One of the key drivers of this demand is the increased use of numerical simulations, such as Computational Fluid Dynamics for product development. This type of simulations generates huge amounts of data and demands massively parallel computing power. Traditionally, this computational power is provided by clusters, which require large investments in hardware and maintenance. Cloud computing offers more flexibility at significantly lower costs but the deployment of numerical applications is time-consuming, error-prone and requires a high level of expertise. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the SimplyHPC framework that automatizes the deployment of the cluster in the cloud, deploys and executes large scale and parallel numerical simulations, and finally downloads the results and shuts down the cluster. Using this tool, we have been able to successfully run the widely accepted s
olvers, namely PETSc, HPCG and ANSYS CFX, in a performant and scalable manner on Microsoft Azure. It has been shown that the cloud computing performance is comparable to on-premises clusters in terms of efficiency and scalability and should be considered as an economically viable alternative.
(More)