Abhishek Gupta defends his PhD thesis on HPC in cloud

PPLer Abhishek Gupta has successfuly defended his PhD thesis on effective High Performance Computing (HPC) in the Cloud. Here is his thesis abstract: The advantages of pay-as-you-go model, elasticity, and the flexibility and customization offered by virtualization make cloud computing an attractive option for meeting the needs of some HPC users. However, there is a mismatch between cloud environments and HPC requirements. The poor interconnect and I/O performance in cloud, HPC-agnostic cloud schedulers, and the inherent heterogeneity and multi-tenancy in cloud are some bottlenecks for HPC in cloud. This thesis goes beyond the research question: "what is the performance of HPC in cloud?" and explores "how can we perform effective and efficient HPC in cloud?" To this end, we adopt the complementary approach of making clouds HPC-aware, and HPC runtime system cloud-aware. Through intelligent application-to-platform mapping, HPC-aware VM placement, interference-aware VM consolidation, cloud-aware HPC load balancing, and malleable jobs, we demonstrate significant benefits for both: users and cloud providers in terms of cost (up to 60%), performance (up to 45%), and throughput (up to 32%).