Reference : Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) vs. in-House HPC Platform: a Cost Analysis

	Document type :	Scientific congresses, symposiums and conference proceedings : Paper published in a book
	Discipline(s) :	Engineering, computing & technology : Computer science
	Focus Areas :	Computational Sciences
	To cite this reference:	http://hdl.handle.net/10993/27837

Title :	Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) vs. in-House HPC Platform: a Cost Analysis
Language :	English
Author, co-author :	Emeras, Joseph [University of Luxembourg > Interdisciplinary Centre for Security, Reliability and Trust (SNT) >]
	Varrette, Sébastien [University of Luxembourg > Faculty of Science, Technology and Communication (FSTC) > Computer Science and Communications Research Unit (CSC)]
	Bouvry, Pascal [University of Luxembourg > Faculty of Science, Technology and Communication (FSTC) > Computer Science and Communications Research Unit (CSC)]
Publication date :	Jun-2016
Main document title :	Proc. of the 9th IEEE Intl. Conf. on Cloud Computing (CLOUD 2016)
Publisher :	IEEE Computer Society
Peer reviewed :	Yes
Audience :	International
City :	San Francisco
Country :	USA
Event name :	9th IEEE Intl. Conf. on Cloud Computing (CLOUD 2016)
Event date :	from 27-06-2016 to 02-07-2016
Event place (city) :	San Francisco
Event country :	USA
Abstract :	[en] Since its advent in the middle of the 2000’s, the Cloud Computing (CC) paradigm is increasingly advertised as THE solution to most IT problems. While High Performance Computing (HPC) centers continuously evolve to provide more computing power to their users, several voices (most probably commercial ones) emit the wish that CC platforms could also serve HPC needs and eventually replace in-house HPC platforms. If we exclude the pure performance point of view where many previous studies highlight a non-negligible overhead induced by the virtualization layer at the heart of every Cloud middleware when submitted to an High Performance Computing (HPC) workload, the question of the real cost-effectiveness is often left aside with the intuition that, most probably, the instances offered by the Cloud providers are competitive from a cost point of view. In this article, we wanted to assert (or infirm) this intuition by evaluating the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of the in- house HPC facility we operate since 2007 within the University of Luxembourg (UL), and compare it with the investment that would have been required to run the same platform (and the same workload) over a competitive Cloud IaaS offer. Our approach to address this price comparison is two-fold. First we propose a theoretical price - performance model based on the study of the actual Cloud instances proposed by one of the major Cloud IaaS actors: Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). Then, based on our own cluster TCO and taking into account all the Operating Expense (OPEX), we propose a hourly price comparison between our in-house cluster and the equivalent EC2 instances. The results obtained advocate in general for the acquisition of an in-house HPC facility, which balance the common intuition in favor of Cloud Computing (CC) platforms, would they be provided by the reference Cloud provider worldwide.
Research centres :	University of Luxembourg: High Performance Computing - ULHPC
Permalink :	http://hdl.handle.net/10993/27837

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