I met recently with a group of academic CIOs and IT Directors in Denver to talk about how virtualization and private cloud technologies can help lower the barriers to adopting a centralized approach to delivering HPC resources in an academic environment. Of course, the barriers and concerns — losing control of resources, fear of not getting ones “fair share” in a shared facility, being forced into a standardized and sub-optimal software environment, etc. — are relevant outside of academia as well.
Because the topic is of broad interest, I’ve published the slides in SlideRocket and added an audio track that explains why virtualization should not be viewed simply as a tax one pays to move into a cloud environment, but rather as an approach that can enable new capabilities that are either difficult or impossible to deliver in an un-virtualized HPC environment; a number of these capabilities speak directly to the most common objections raised to creating centralized computing facilities. I also give examples of what virtualized HPC deployments look like and provide a summary of our latest guidance on how well HPC applications perform on our platform.
You can access the Slide Rocket presentation here.
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