On 05/08/2015 10:04 AM, Jason Ingram wrote:
Azure does offer InfiniBand based VM's, and CentOS is one of their
six primary distributions.
http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/virtual-machines-linux-endorsed-distributions/
I wish I had more to offer on the subject, I joined this community
as a personal choice to try to learn more about HPC and Beowulf type
clusters(very new to it that technology area). I am an Azure
architect though, so am happy to answer questions regarding Azure.
The big issue for performance systems will be how thin/performant the
link to the bare metal/silicon resources are.
Clouds are fantastic capacity machines, and if you have workloads that
match that, great. General clouds are not good on the capability side.
You need a very specific architecture/implementation for them to make
sense in this regard.
Generally (though there are a few special cases) hypervirtualization
isn't as performant as "bare metal". This is one of several reasons why
containers are so interesting to so many people. Paravirtualization is
simply not performant, and is largely for an infrastructure density
play, where fundamental app performance isn't the major issue.
For very high performance cloud/on-demand architectures, you need
something very close to the metal. There you have a more limited set of
choices, including our hosts Penguin on Demand system (or to toot our
own horn in financial services, Lucera). There the virtualization (if
it exists) is very closely coupled to the bare metal or containerized so
you don't get the performance degradation common in many cloud designs.
The danger with cloud (and pretty much every other technology) is
believing the hype and assuming its a silver bullet to solve every
problem. In HPC its more along the lines of "it depends", usually on
the use case. For non-performance sensitive workloads, it can be
fantastic. For performance sensitive workloads, you need to be careful
where you apply it.
FWIW: there's a strong argument to be made that workloads are generally
getting performance sensitive given the volume of data people are
manipulating, so there will be pressure on cloud builders to adopt
architectures/implementations more along the lines of what we built at
Lucera and others.
My $0.02USD, and note that my biases should be quite obvious.
--
Joseph Landman, Ph.D
Founder and CEO
Scalable Informatics, Inc.
e: [email protected]
w: http://scalableinformatics.com
t: @scalableinfo
p: +1 734 786 8423 x121
c: +1 734 612 4615
_______________________________________________
Beowulf mailing list, [email protected] sponsored by Penguin Computing
To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit
http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
