High Performance Computing on Demand: Sharing and Mutualization of Clusters

For software vendors who need to provide their softwares as services via Internet, an infrastructure of high performance computing (HPC) such as clusters is required. However, for small and medium enterprises (SMEs) and/or startup businesses, owning a cluster is generally out of reach. Indeed, the cost of a cluster can be very high, since enterprises have to deal with acquisition costs, as well as many operating costs (engineering, power supply, air conditioning, etc.). The emergence of infrastructure providers – like Amazon, Google, IBM, Sun, etc. – allows businesses to use remote infrastructures. However, in the long term, renting those infrastructures can also be expensive. In order to lower the cost, an alternative solution might be for small businesses to join in order to purchase and maintain a common infrastructure that would be shared among them. In this case, each partner has to have the guarantee that their use of the infrastructure would be equitable, rational and proportional to their investment. Additionally, customers would expect the service/application to be cheaper and to have a good performance. In principle, infrastructure sharing is not simple to manage. In this paper, we have defined two approaches concerning the equitable sharing of a cluster among several concurrent softwares hosted as services. The first approach is based on the static partitioning of resources, and the second approach is based on the dynamic resource allocation with dynamic priorities among applications. This work has been carried out in cooperation with an industrial project named CILOE1. Such a project aims at providing a shared computing cluster to small editors of electronic design automation (EDA) and embedded softwares.