Exposing HPC services in the Cloud: the CloudLightning Approach

Abstract

Nowadays we are noticing important changes in the way High Performance Computing (HPC) providers are dealing with the demand. The growing requirements of modern data- and compute-intensive applications ask for new models for their development, deployment and execution. New approaches related with Big Data, peta- and exa-scale computing are going to dramatically change the design, development and exploitation of highly demanding applications, such as the HPC ones. Due to the increased complexity of these applications and their outstanding requirements which cannot be supported by the classical centralized cloud models, novel approaches, inspired by autonomic computing, are investigated as an alternative. In this paper, we offer an overview of such an approach, undertaken by the CloudLightning initiative. In this context, a novel cloud delivery model that offers the capabilities to describe and deliver dynamic and tailored services is being considered. This new delivery model, based on a self-organizing and self-managing approach, will allow provisioning and delivery of coalitions of heterogeneous cloud resources, built on top of the resources hosted by a cloud service provider.