Performance evaluation of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud for NASA high-performance computing applications

Cloud computing environments are now widely available and are being increasingly utilized for technical computing. They are also being touted for high-performance computing (HPC) applications in science and engineering. For example, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) Services offers specialized Cluster Compute instance types to run HPC applications. In this paper, we compare the performance characteristics of two Amazon EC2 HPC instance types with that of National Aeronautics and Space Administration's (NASA) Pleiades supercomputer, an SGI (R) ICE cluster. For this study, we utilized the HPC Challenge kernels and the NAS Parallel Benchmarks along with four full-scale applications from the repertoire of codes that are being used by NASA scientists and engineers. We compare the total runtime of these codes for varying number of cores. We also break out the computation and communication times for a subset of these applications to explore the effect of interconnect differences on the two systems. In general, the single node performance of the two platforms is equivalent. However, for most of the codes when scaling to larger core counts, the performance of the EC2 HPC instances generally lags that of Pleiades because of worse network performance of the former. In addition to analyzing application performance, we also briefly touch upon the overhead due to virtualization and the usability of cloud environments such as Amazon EC2. Published 2013. This article is a U.S. Government work and is in the public domain in the U.S.A.