research
Evaluating the Suitability of Commercial Clouds for NASA's High Performance Computing Applications: A Trade Study
- Publication date
- Publisher
Abstract
NASAs High-End Computing Capability (HECC) Project is periodically asked if it could be more cost effective through the use of commercial cloud resources. To answer the question, HECCs Application Performance and Productivity (APP) team undertook a performance and cost evaluation comparing three domains: two commercial cloud providers, Amazon and Penguin, and HECCs in-house resourcesthe Pleiades and Electra systems. In the study, the APP team used a combination of the NAS Parallel Benchmarks (NPB) and six full applications from NASAs workload on Pleiades and Electra to compare performance of nodes based on three different generations of Intel Xeon processorsHaswell, Broadwell, and Skylake. Because of export control limitations, the most heavily used applications on Pleiades and Electra could not be used in the cloud; therefore, only one of the applications, OpenFOAM, represents work from the Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate and the Human and Exploration Mission Directorate. The other five applications are from the Science Mission Directorate