Cost-Benefit Analysis of Public Clouds for Offloading In-House HPC Jobs

The Supercomputing Education and Research Centre (SERC) at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), located in the South East Asian Region, has been providing state-of-the-art services and support for High Performance Computing (HPC) for the academic users of the institute since 1990. This centre, facilitates OpenMP, MPI, CUDA and OpenCL based HPC jobs for academic research. To augment or support the existing demand for compute intensive, tightly coupled HPC workloads in the institute, it was desirable to explore cloud based HPC services. This study is a comparative cost-benefit analysis of the in-house compute facility at SERC with that of the commercial cloud providers like Amazon, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure and Sabalcore. The Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of SahasraT (the in-house supercomputer) is computed and used to identify the cost of running a small job for 24 hours on the in-house facility. This is then compared with the estimated cost of running the same job on comparative cloud instances. Several research papers that provide a detailed evaluation of HPC on the cloud with performance benchmarks and the comparison to in-house HPC facilities, were studied. These references have been used to compare performance of compute instance in the public cloud to the performance of HPC at SahasraT. The results obtained in this study, advocate that current cloud platforms are expensive in both cost and performance as compared to the in-house facility at SERC