Challenges to Deploy HPC in the Cloud

Today, companies face problems maintaining their systems, information, data, and programs on in-house servers. The need for deploying HPC in the cloud is increasing rapidly. The cloud has transformed the business operations of organizations. Companies use high-performance computing in the cloud to streamline their business processes.

Cloud computing architectures streamline HPC by incorporating powerful computational capabilities for organizations, engineers, and researchers. Cloud HPC is an excellent way for companies to normalize or optimize IT operations, especially for businesses that lack access to on-premises infrastructure.

The cloud’s scalability and flexibility offer a good capacity to eliminate long job queues and waiting times. However, like traditional HPC solutions, the advanced cloud HPC also has certain deployment issues. In today’s article, we will these issues related to HPC in the cloud. Read on!

Migration and Integration Issues

Enabling a new HPC application in the cloud is not challenging and quite simple. However, moving an existing HPC application into the cloud has its peculiarities. You will require pre-tests to ensure a successful migration.

You will have to ensure the migration comes out correctly and on time. Besides, establishing a project schedule or hiring a team of experts are some variables to consider. Another challenge is synchronization or integration of on-premises cloud with the private cloud.  

Data Security Problems

Many companies have shown concerns about cloud security. Businesses that use HPC have robust security requirement, and it is a stumbling block to cloud-based high-performance computing solutions. A recent research study shows that 43% of companies have concerns about data governance and security.

A major problem is the requirement of trust to ensure data security because companies possessing data and codes are highly sensitive, proprietary, and profitable. That’s why many companies can’t afford to embrace the “trust” aspect, which is inherently required for data security.

Because there is too much at stake, businesses require sophisticated data security from service providers to streamline their operations.

Data Transfer Issues

Running a high-performance computing application in the cloud requires a business to transfer data into the cloud. Although some service providers can optimize the data transfer, the process is still an obstacle for many companies.

Recent studies show that many companies face the problem of transferring data into and out of the cloud. Time and money are commonly cited barriers for data transfer. Although it seems easier to keep data in on-premises infrastructure in the long run, the investment in transferring data to the cloud is outweighed by the advantages of more agile and flexible high-performance computing.

Low Performance

It is a common belief among many IT professionals that cloud HPC is faster and reliable than on-premises HPC. Although this is true, many organizations have shown concerns about the low performance of cloud HPC up to some extent.

Companies using HPC expect high performance, and many don’t believe that cloud HPC can compete with on-site data centers. A recent market survey concluded that 35% of companies were concerned about inter-connect latencies and network performance.

Although recent advancements have streamlined and speeded up cloud networking and trimmed latency, the networking speed between compute nodes is still not fast enough to run HPC applications smoothly. Modern HPC applications that underperform might be running into virtual machine resource problems.

Hardware Failures and Network Congestions

A server hosting multiple HPC applications can undergo failures, causing different degrees of havoc with higher workloads until the system is restarted or restructured. Besides, an increasing number of virtual machines are deployed on to a single server. Because each machine wants its share on the network, a service with a single NIC port can get overwhelmed.

For example, these issues are not having enough CPU cores or memory space. The problem is also due to higher bandwidth requirements for I/O, and the virtualized drivers may not be compatible with hardware capabilities.

Final Words

Despite the challenges, the cloud offers a significant degree of flexibility that you don’t find with on-premise HPC infrastructure. Your company can take benefit from the many high-quality HPC applications and managed cloud services offered by Clovertex

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