Keeping up with High Performance Computing’s ever-expanding horizon, with a chance of clouds. ☁️

Google Cloud HPC Toolkit

Google’s Cloud HPC Toolkit allows admins to define a cluster in YAML and their ghpc command-line tool combine various Google-maintained and community Terraform modules to produce a static directory of Terraform to apply, tear down and apply again! Modules already exist to have a fully working Slurm batch scheduler, optionally in federation with your OnPrem cluster, with a wide array of software support available, including Spack and Intel’s OneAPI suite.

Taking advantage of the best of cloud these clusters are capable of autoscaling and can take advantage of Google Cloud’s services and partners.

All using industry standard tooling: HashiCorp’s Terraform & Packer, implementing Google’s best practices in SRE .

Google Cloud HPC Toolkit workflow
Google Cloud HPC Toolkit workflow

Accelerate your High Performance Computing journey with new Google Cloud HPC Toolkit | Google Cloud

Google Cloud: Cloud HPC Toolkit, an open source tool that enables users to easily create repeatable, turnkey HPC clusters based on proven best practices.

WITH CLOUD HPC TOOLKIT, GOOGLE PURSUES HPC, INTEL PUSHES ONEAPI | Next Platform

Intel and Google Cloud Announce Cloud HPC Toolkit | HPC Wire

Google Cloud flexes Arms with Ampere Altra

Expanding the Tau VM family with Arm-based processors | Google Cloud

Google Cloud enters the Arm Neoverse with Ampere Altra Arm processors!

Scaling up to 48 vCPUs, Tau T2A VMs can be deployed as part of Google Kubernetes Engine, as Compute and in Dataflow.

Google Cloud Podcast discusses Arm Servers on GCP with Jon Masters and Emma Haruka Iwao

AWS ParallelCluster 3.2 adds Slurm memory-aware scheduling and expands filesystem support

Slurm-based memory-aware scheduling in AWS ParallelCluster 3.2 by Oliver Perks

tldr; --mem and --mem-per-cpu job flags are now available!

Expanded filesystems support in AWS ParallelCluster 3.2 by Oliver Perks

ParallelCluster already has support for  Amazon Elastic File System (EFS) Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS)  and  Amazon FSx for Lustre . In this release we added support for the  FSx for NetApp ONTAP  and  FSx for OpenZFS  filesystems.

With this ParallelCluster 3.2, you can now mount up to 20 Amazon FSx file systems and up to 20 Amazon EFS filesystems.

Brendan Bouffler’s “HPC guy @awscloud” Twitter thread on the release

Rocky Linux on Google Cloud as fully supported alternative to CentOS

Moving off CentOS? Introducing Rocky Linux Optimized for Google Cloud

As CentOS 7 reaches end of life, many enterprises are considering their options for an enterprise-grade, downstream Linux distribution on which to run their production applications. Rocky Linux has emerged as a strong alternative that, like CentOS, is 100% compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Also This Month

John C. Linford publishes a comprehensive Getting Started with NVIDIA Arm HPC Developers Kit

Getting started with HPC on Arm64 | GitHub

This guide includes how-to guides, sample code, recommendations, and technical best practices to help new users get started with Arm-based systems like the NVIDIA Arm HPC Developer Kit. While it is intended for the users and administrators of NVIDIA’s Arm-based platforms, this guide is also generically useful for anyone running HPC applications on Arm CPUs, with or without GPUs. The focus is mostly on the CPU since Arm-hosted GPUs are just the same as GPUs hosted by any other CPUs.

John C. Linford on Twitter

Fujitsu to provide A64FX HPC as a service via new Cloud

Fujitsu launches “Fujitsu Computing as a Service (CaaS),” delivering customers access to world-leading computing technologies via the public cloud | Fujitsu

Japanese space agency to put massive HPC cloud to the test | The Register

Atos sees Federated HPC Cloud as the future, with their acquisition of Nimbix and their HPC Cloud experience

PULLING ALL THE LEVERS FOR HPC IN THE CLOUD | Next Platform

CXL further cements itself as the leading CPU interconnect standard

Having previously absorbed AMD/Arm’s CCIX, HPE’s Gen-Z and now IBM’s OpenCAPI. CXL enhances PCIe, enables device caching of main memory and most interesting for HPC enables coherent memory access.

OpenCAPI to Be Folded into CXL | HPCWire

Interesting paper that quantifies the carbon intensity of HDD/SSD drives by CAPEX/OPEX, i.e. carbon to produce and carbon to run.

The Dirty Secret of SSDs: Embodied Carbon | arxiv