Sabalcore Computing

Sabalcore [13] offers HPC systems over the Internet for both on-demand and dedicated solutions. On-demand access is accomplished using an SSH client or secure remote desktop interface from any Windows or Linux laptop, desktop, or workstation. Users are provided with an NFS-exported home directory with persistent storage for results, code, applications, and data.

As part of their service, Sabalcore offers accounting tools that allow administrators to assign and track usage by users, projects, or resources. One interesting feature offered by Sabalcore is called Dynamic Cluster Isolation (DCI), which builds an optional firewall around the compute nodes of a particular job. DCI logically isolates the compute nodes of a running job that, according to Sabalcore, should satisfy Federal Government International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) requirements.

In terms of hardware, the operating system is preinstalled on the metal with a fixed amount of RAM per core, which is variable depending on the system. To facilitate fast startup, Sabalcore has dozens of popular open source applications that are ready to run. They will also install customer software and allow the customer to build and install their own application software.

Available hardware consists of Intel Xeon and AMD Opteron CPUs ranging from eight-core to 32-core nodes, running from 2.33 to 3.0GHz, with 32 to 128GB of RAM per node. They also have a handful of NVidia-based GPUs for testing but are not ready for production work. These resources are connected with both an Ethernet and InfiniBand non-virtualized network, which means they are run directly on the wire. The primary filesystem is based on NFS with parallel filesystems available for specific applications.

The primary scheduler is Torque, and the company also offers a custom scheduler. Currently, they do not offer cloud bursting, but could implement it if needed by customers. In terms of cost, Sabalcore stated that price is volume dependent and ranges from US$ 0.16 to US$ 0.29/core per hour and includes RAM, storage, support, and bandwidth.

Additionally, Sabalcore pointed out that their service includes comprehensive technical support (i.e., installation and tuning of application, workflow optimization, scripting, general consulting, debugging, troubleshooting, etc.) and is available by phone and email. Optional 24/7 phone support is available. They also can provide private clusters, including Windows HPC systems, contracts, custom SLAs, and ITAR-compliant networks.

SGI

SGI's cloud computing service is called Cyclone [14] and is specifically dedicated for technical applications. Through Cyclone, SGI offers both a software stack and HPC hardware in a nonvirtualized environment together with HPC applications. Pulling from both open source and commercial vendors, they have applications in Computational Biology, Computational Chemistry and Materials, Computational Fluid Dynamics, Finite Element Analysis, and Computational Electromagnetics.

Somewhat unique to Cyclone is the ability to use different computation environments, such as scale-up or scale-out nodes, choice of operating systems (SUSE or RHEL), and two interconnects (SGI NUMAlink or InfiniBand) that can be configured into multiple topologies (e.g., hypercube, all-to-all, fat tree, single-rail, or dual-rail).

The SGI Cyclone service offers either 3 or 2GB of memory per core. Using the SGI UV shared memory systems with NUMAlink interconnect, large memory systems can range between 500GB and 2TB of shared memory. Setup time can vary by application, and if the user wants to run one of the pre-installed applications, experienced customers can be up and running on Cyclone within a few hours. SGI notes that new customers can access a web portal GUI interface that provides assistance with running batch jobs on a cluster as well command-line SSH access. For some customers, SGI engineering staff will run their jobs as a service.

Within the cloud, SGI offers access to SGI ICE and SGI Rackable clusters running Intel Xeon processors as well as SGI UV shared memory systems, also running Intel Xeon processors. Interestingly, SGI notes that they have not seen any demand for GPU accelerators but can offer access to NVidia Tesla GPUs on request. Interconnects are either SGI NUMAlink or InfiniBand and are not virtualized. Customers can request a free trial access with which to test performance, as well as upload and download speeds.

In terms of storage, high-performance SGI Infinite Storage systems are available for scratch space and long-time archiving of customer data. No pricing information was given for storage. SGI provides a web-based user portal to run LS-DYNA and OpenFOAM that connects with Altair's PBS Pro job scheduler. For other technical applications, SGI offers PBS Pro as the batch scheduler. Currently, SGI is exploring the option to allow SGI customers to cloud burst onto Cyclone. SGI did not provide any cost information for remote computation. In addition to compute cycles, SGI offers: operating systems and/or application configuration, application tuning, application running, and remote data visualization.

Gompute

The final company in this comparison is Gompute [15]. However, they were not able to respond to my specific questions. The following information was found on their web page. Gompute provides CPU hours, storage, system administration, and support for HPC applications, including both open source and commercial. For commercial applications, users may either start a private license server at Gompute using the license key they get from an authorized reseller or allow the connection to their local license server. Gompute uses a pay-per-use model, whereby users get real-time information about their consumption for each job. This feature allows users to minimize their fixed costs, because the cost is proportional to the use of CPUs, storage, licenses, system support, and so on.

Gompute provides HPC services from computing farms located in Sweden and the United States. Both systems offer the same environment and are based on the Linux operating system. All clusters are based on x86-64 CPU architecture and InfiniBand interconnect. Storage alternatives include InfiniBand-enabled parallel filesystems. Shared and dedicated communication lines are available up to 1Gbps. The transport of data is also possible with the use of hardware-encrypted USB disks and a delivery service.

Resource usage depends on users' needs. The several alternatives include running jobs in a ready-to-use batch queue, buying a package of hours to be consumed within a predetermined time interval, reserving a fixed amount of CPU cores for a fixed period of time, or running on a pure batch queue. Users access Gompute resources through an encrypted connection and identify themselves using digital certificates. Users have access only to their data. SSH and SSL protocols are used to access Gompute.