::abstract

e-Infrastructures for Science and Industry -- Clusters, Grids, and Clouds

Wolfgang Gentzsch (The DEISA Project)

All slides are available at
http://icis.pcz.pl/~roman/Gentzsch_PPAM_Wroclaw_Sept_2009_short.pdf

While Grids allow for direct access to and sharing of distributed resources, for good reasons, clouds are datacenters on the Internet which provide IT services as a utility, on a pay-per-use basis. while Grids stand out because of their flexible, dynamic, feature-rich resources and thus are complex by their very nature, Clouds provide an entirely new business model with its own set of value propositions for (currently mainly) enterprise computing environments, including application scalability, improved economies of scale, reduced costs, resource efficiencies, resource elasticity, faster deployment times, value-based pricing model, disaster recovery and an on-demand infrastructure enabling the truly dynamic data center.

Cloud applications will likely follow similar strategies as grid-enabling ones. Just as challenging, though, are the cultural, mental, legal, and political aspects of clouds. Building trust and reputation among the users and the providers will help in some simple scenarios. But it is still a challenge to imagine users easily entrusting their corporate assets and sensitive data to cloud service providers.

Another question which we will try to answer is how suitable the Cloud services model will be for the capability computing demands of the HPC community, in research and industry. Here, we will look at DEISA, the Distributed European Infrastructure for Supercomputing Applications, to analyze the resource requrements of HPC applications, and check their suitability for the Cloud. We will show how DEISA will have a good chance to be sustainable in the long term, as an e-infrastructure for the computational scientist. And then, we might end up with a DEISA Cloud which will become an external (or public) HPC node within your grid application workflow.

Thus, the aim of the talk will be to elaborate on the main differences between HPC centers, grids and clouds, analyze sustainability with the aid of the DEISA experience, and provide an HPC application check list for Clouds.