SCIENCE

Sixty-two percent of high performance computing (HPC) users have experimented with private or public cloud, according to a survey of delegates performed by Platform Computing at the Supercomputing Conference (SC'10) in November 2010.  HPC users cited a number of ways they are evaluating private cloud infrastructures, including building shared infrastructures (36 percent) and bursting existing workloads (15 percent). Users are also experimenting with offloading applications or workloads to run on public cloud infrastructures (23 percent).

Quotes:

• "Until recently, HPC users have been skeptical of implementing HPC cloud environments due to potential performance issues stemming from virtualization and the need for proper load balancing and fast compute times.  The data we collected from delegates at this year's Supercomputing Conference show that the tide is turning for private cloud within the HPC community.  Our customers are also reflecting this trend with more beginning to explore capabilities that help them better manage workloads while keeping an eye on their costs," said Randy Clark, CMO, Platform Computing.

Key Points

• Platform Computing surveyed 100 IT executives across research, government, education, manufacturing and other industries at the conference to determine why HPC organizations are evaluating cloud solutions and their current and future plans for HPC cloud initiatives.
• Of those delegates already evaluating cloud strategies, 74 percent report a positive experience with using cloud computing and 45 percent report a positive experience with cloud bursting.
• Among the reasons cited for HPC users to evaluate cloud solutions were the following:
  • Ability to have a more flexible infrastructure - 33 percent
  • Ability to provision resources more quickly – 15 percent
  • Ability to address problems that were previously difficult to solve - 12 percent
  • More cost effective – 9 percent
• For those delegates that had not yet evaluated cloud computing, 26 percent intend to do so over the next 12 months.