Towards a High Performance Virtualized IaaS Deployment

Scientific computing endeavors have created clusters, grids, and supercomputers as high performance computing (HPC) platforms and paradigms. These resources focus on peak performance and computing efficiency, thereby enabling scientific community to tackle non-trivial problems on massively parallel architectures. Meanwhile, efforts to leverage the economies of scale from data center operations and advances in virtualization technologies have created large scale Clouds. Such Infrastructureas-a-Service (IaaS) deployments provide mechanisms for handling millions of user interactions concurrently or organizing, cataloging, and retrieving mountains of data in a way that allows users to specify a custom computing environment tailored to their needs. Combining concepts from both supercomputing and clouds will enable users to leverage the performance of HPC applications with the ease and availably in clouds, creating an ideal environment for many scientific computing applications. This work proposes building a heterogeneous, high performance IaaS using the OpenStack software concentrating on virtualization performance, heterogeneous hardware and GPUs, high speed interconnects, advanced scheduling and high performance storage to create a novel IaaS supercomputing system.