Towards Auction-Based HPC Computing in the Cloud

Cloud computing is expanding widely in the world of IT infrastructure. This is due partly to the cost-saving effect of economies of scale. Fair market conditions can in theory provide a healthy environment to reflect the most reasonable costs of computations. While fixed cloud pricing provides an attractive low entry barrier for compute-intensive applications, both the consumer and supplier of computing resources can see high efficiency for their investments by participating in auction-based exchanges. There are huge incentives for the cloud provider to offer auctioned resources. However, from the consumer perspective, using these resources is a sparsely discussed challenge. This paper reports a methodology and framework designed to address the challenges of using HPC (High Performance Computing) applications on auction-based cloud clusters. The authors focus on HPC applications and describe a method for determining bid-aware checkpointing intervals. They extend a theoretical model for determining checkpoint intervals using statistical analysis of pricing histories. Also the latest developments in the SpotHPC framework are introduced which aim at facilitating the managed execution of real MPI applications on auction-based cloud environments. The authors use their model to simulate a set of algorithms with different computing and communication densities. The results show the complex interactions between optimal bidding strategies and parallel applications performance.