Our Research Computing Roundtable will be discussing HPC in the cloud vs. on-prem. Our panelists bring a wealth of knowledge and are happy to answer your questions during the live stream.
Obviously, the fundamental difference between cloud vs on-premise software is where it resides. On-premise software is installed locally, on your business’ computers and servers, where cloud software is hosted on the vendor’s server and accessed via a web browser and other client software.
As well as accessibility, there are a raft of other things that need to be considered when making a decision about where to host your software, including software ownership, cost of ownership, software updates and additional services, such as support and implementation. Here we will explore the pros and cons.
About Warewulf: Warewulf is a bare metal, stateless, container based, cluster provisioning solution to facilitate operating system deployment and manage large scale clustered hardware resources. Being open source for over two decades and pioneering the concept of stateless node management, Warewulf is among the most successful HPC cluster platforms in the industry with support from OpenHPC, contributors worldwide, and usage from every sector. Today, Warewulf unites the ecosystem with the ability to provision containers directly to the bare metal hardware at a massive scale, simply and flexibly.
About Apptainer: As Docker brought containers into enterprise, Apptainer (formerly Singularity) brought containers into HPC with a containerization strategy that just works for HPC architectures, security models, and use cases.
Now Singularity is part of the Linux Foundation and re-released under a new name for the open source project, Apptainer.
Application Containers:
While many container systems are built, designed, and optimized for microservices, Apptainer is for applications and computational use cases.
Portable Jobs and Environments:
Apptainer allows you to bring your environments anywhere, creating extreme portability from system to system.
Trusted supply chain / Immutable / Encrypted:
Absolute trust in your environment via cryptographic key validation and encryption. Apptainer was created to bring the benefits of container computing to HPC use cases and system architectures. Apptainer is used pervasively throughout HPC centers as well as other community projects and even commercial vendors. The Apptainer founder and leading developers are all part of CIQ, and we provide enhanced capabilities to customers and partners.
About Fuzzball:
CIQ for You: Hybrid Performance Computing Platform as a Service Improving Software Infrastructure for Everyone
“HPC2.0 – The Next Generation of High Performance Computing”
Imagine a computing environment so powerful that it can orchestrate workflows, services, and data while maintaining supply chain integrity from on premise, to cloud, and to the edge. Including the ability to support multiple systems and multiple clouds, federated into a virtual cloud, where every workload lands based on architecture availability, cost, and data management policies.
This is Fuzzball
Integrate multiple HPC resources into One: Geographically dispersed on-premise supercomputers, Fuzzball is designed as a cloud native and hybrid, federated computing platform for unification of geographically distributed HPC instances whether on-premise or cloud.
Meta scheduling & orchestration across hybrid resources: Orchestration across architectures and resources. Scheduling based on cost of compute, data & availability of compute. Data (including: Locality, Mobility, Gravity, and Security).
Cloud-based HPC clusters and nodes: HPC resources can be on-premise, multi-premise, cloud, multi-cloud, and federated. Cloud based resources are elastic based on jobs, resource policies & data. Our platform supports all major clouds natively, Kubernetes, as well as custom cloud resources.
A unified workload and resource management platform: Unifying the end-user and administrator experience no matter where you utilize the platform is a design principle. A user interface (UI) application for the submission, tracking, and management of HPC jobs and workflows which is completely API driven with a command line interface as well as a GUI interface. This provides monitoring and management of all HPC resources leveraging standard enterprise monitoring and management of all resources in our platform.
“Fuzzball is readily capable of expanding to integrate new physical or cloud-based HPC assets down to the node level, even the component level. Fuzzball can be easily enhanced with FPGAs and GPUs or the newest network protocols to take advantage of enhancements as they come to market. No more being locked in by anyone or anything.”