Cloud Service for HPC Management: Ideas and Appliance

Abstract

The paper presents a cloud service aimed to solve promising nanotechnology problems on supercomputer systems. At the present stage of computer technology evolution it is possible to study the properties and processes in complex systems at molecular and even atomic levels. Such calculations require the use of high performance computing systems of various types, for example, GRID systems and HPC clusters. Considering the time consuming computational tasks, the need arises of software for automatic and unified monitoring of such computations, as well as unified environment for data preparation and storage. The preliminary result of the work is a prototype of the complex cloud environment, implemented as a KIAM Multilogin service and an application software accessible from users virtual machines. It consists of a virtual desktop environment, and the web-based application for calculation management, that includes project-management features, remote task execution abilities, storage and monitoring features and basic pre- and post-processing capabilities. The first applications of the service were the software packages GIMM_NANO and Flow_and_Particles, designed to solve the actual problems of nanoelectronics, laser nanotechnology, multiscale problems of applied gas dynamics. In this paper the main ideas, the cloud service based on, the inner structure of the service and the technologies used to build it are considered.