Boston
May 8-11, 2017

Event Details

Please note: All times listed below are in Central Time Zone


Running a Scientific Application on an OpenStack Cloud

The scientific community is still largely wedded to a traditional HPC compute model where a task scheduler provisions bare metal nodes and the application runs directly on the node OS. Typically, the application is restricted to using the node's software libraries and compiler toolchain. In our experience this compute model causes the development environment on the HPC cluster and the user's desktop to differ, adding obstacles to software development. In addition, cluster software upgrades potentially alter the application's runtime behavior or results.

From our point of view the provisioning of virtual machines in OpenStack offers a user friendly alternative. But how does a scientific application perform on OpenStack?

Here we run a quantum chemistry application employing novel computational algorithms written in Fortran and MPI and investigate the changes necessary in the work flow and the application code and the impact of virtualization on performance and parallel scalability.


What can I expect to learn?

We looked at how much effort it is to run a scientific research code on an OpenStack cloud and what the performance and parallel scaling impact was.

Monday, May 8, 2:00pm-2:40pm (6:00pm - 6:40pm UTC)
Difficulty Level: Intermediate
Senior Software Engineer
Nicolas worked for more than a decade as a staff scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory investigating HPC algorithms and implementations for quantum chemical computations. Now he works as a software engineer at Canonical on infrastructure software such as OpenStack. FULL PROFILE
Scientist
PhD in Computational Chemistry at University of Cordoba developing codes to apply Quantum Dynamics techniques to: Optical Properties of Metallic Nanoparticles, Near Field Enhancement in Metallic Nanoparticles, Absorption Spectrum of organic molecules, and Interfacial Electron and Energy transfer between molecules and Semiconductor Nanoparticles. Development of computational codes based on... FULL PROFILE