Benchmarking the cloud

Project Information

Discipline
Computer Science (401) 
Subdiscipline
11.07 Computer Science 
Orientation
Education 
Abstract

Our project aims to benchmark the various clouds for running scientific applications. This will usually test the quality of the network interconnect and the variation in the latency when running MPI jobs. Our secondary aim is to run any scientific applications which utilize transactional memory to test STM performance on the cloud

Intellectual Merit

How important is the proposed activity to advancing knowledge and understanding within its own field or across different fields? - This project attempts to give all researchers a survey of various clouds out there to choose for their experimentation How well qualified is the proposer (individual or team) to conduct the project? (If appropriate, the reviewer will comment on the quality of prior work.) - We are a team of graduate students having a course in both cloud computing and scientific computing. To what extent does the proposed activity suggest and explore creative, original, or potentially transformative concepts? - It is a survey of existing tools/infrastructure in the market. How well conceived and organized is the proposed activity? -We have already run many scientific applications as benchmarks on the Amazon EC2 compute clusters. We also plan on running these on Open Science Data Cloud, subject to approval

Broader Impacts

How well does the activity advance discovery and understanding while promoting teaching, training, and learning? -This project, at the very least, will help researchers get started with using the clouds for scientific applications. How well does the proposed activity broaden the participation of underrepresented groups (e.g., gender, ethnicity, disability, geographic, etc.)? -Neutral to all these, it will open up the information for everyone to access Will the results be disseminated broadly to enhance scientific and technological understanding? -Yes What may be the benefits of the proposed activity to society? -Better understanding of the cloud infrastructures

Project Contact

Project Lead
Ashish Jain (ajeis) 
Project Manager
Ashish Jain (ajeis) 

Resource Requirements

Hardware Systems
  • alamo (Dell optiplex at TACC)
  • foxtrot (IBM iDataPlex at UF)
  • hotel (IBM iDataPlex at U Chicago)
  • india (IBM iDataPlex at IU)
  • sierra (IBM iDataPlex at SDSC)
  • xray (Cray XM5 at IU)
  • bravo (large memory machine at IU)
  • delta (GPU Cloud)
 
Use of FutureGrid

Use the resources to benchmark the grid

Scale of Use

A few VMs of each type of machine for a maximum of total 10 days

Project Timeline

Submitted
11/09/2012 - 23:00 
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