What are some of reasons to access a remote computer system?

*This material is from Data Carpentry, 2015.

  • Your computer does not have enough resources to run the desired analysis (memory, processors, disk space, network bandwidth).
  • You want to produce results faster than your computer can.
  • You cannot install software in your computer (application does not have support for your operating system, conflicts with other existing applications)

Main Computational Resources

Computer Node

  • High Performance Computing (HPC): large assemble of physical machines and a homogeneous operating system (e.g., your institutions' HPC, XSEDE's HPC)

  • Cloud Computing: virtual machines, distributed platforms and/or applications offered as a service (e.g., Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Computing)

  • Virtual machine (VM): software computer that like a physical computer can run an operating system and applications

  • Operating system (OS): the basic software layer that allows execution and management of applications
  • Physical machine: the hardware (processors, memory, disk and network)

HPC vs. Cloud:

HPC Cloud
User account on the system root account on the system
Limited control of the system Full control of the system
Central shared file system Local file system
Jobs submitted into a queue Jobs executed on each resource
Account-based isolation OS-based isolation
Batch-oriented execution of applications Support for batch or interactive applications
Request for resource and time allocation Pay-per-use

HPC vs. Cloud

Resources:

  • Cloud computing offerings:
  • Amazon EC2: http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/
  • Microsoft Azure: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/
  • Google Cloud Platform: https://cloud.google.com/
  • iPlant's Atmosphere: http://www.iplantcollaborative.org/ci/atmosphere
  • iPlant's help page: https://pods.iplantcollaborative.org/wiki/display/atmman/Atmosphere+Manual+Table+of+Contents
  • HPC offerings:
  • XSEDE: https://www.xsede.org/high-performance-computing