Using AWS EC2 as Test-Bed infrastructure in the I/O system configuration for HPC applications

Abstract

From recent years, the use of public cloud platforms as infrastructure have been gaining popularity in many scientific areas and High Performance Computing (HPC) is not an exception. These kind of platforms can be used for system administrators as Test-Bed systems, to evaluate and detect performanceinefficiencies in the I/O subsystem, and take decisions about the configuration parameters that have influence in the performance of an application, without compromising the performance of the production HPC system. In this paper, we propose a methodology to evaluate parallel applications by using virtual clusters as test system. Our experimental validation indicates that virtual clusters are an easy and quick solution for system administrators, to analyze the impact of the I/O system on the I/O kernel of the parallel application and take performance decisions in a controlled environment.