Performance evaluation of Amazon EC2 for NASA HPC applications

Abstract

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 EC2 Services offers a specialized Cluster Compute instance to run HPC applications. In this paper, we compare the performance characteristics of Amazon EC2 HPC instances to that of NASA's Pleiades supercomputer, an SGI ICE cluster. For this study, we utilized the HPCC 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 EC2 HPC instance generally lags that of Pleiades due to 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.