Rethinking Hpc Platforms For 'second Gen' Applications

Researchers at the universities of Edinburgh and St. Andrews in the U.K. suggest a new approach to high-performance computing (HPC) infrastructure involving containerization is necessitated by second-generation applications.

"Many of the emerging second-generation HPC applications move beyond tightly-coupled, compute-centric methods and algorithms and embrace more heterogeneous, multi-component workflows, dynamic and ad-hoc computation, and data-centric methodologies," the researchers say.

They define a set of "container HPC" (cHPC) services as an array "of operating-system-level services and [application programming interfaces] that can run alongside and integrate with existing job via Linux containers to provide isolated, user-deployed application environment containers, application introspection, and resource throttling via the cgroups kernel extension."

The researchers also note the main thrust of their work is assessing a prototype system "to carry out detailed measurements and benchmarks to analyze the overhead and scalability of our approach."

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