Managing high-performance computing applications as an on-demand service on federated clouds

There are several challenges (e.g., imbalance between supply and demand of hardware resources and software licenses, and usability) under modern High-Performance Computing (HPC) environment. As a means of providing an on-demand service for end users, we propose a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) approach for managing commercial HPC applications as a Web-based service deployed on top of federated clouds. Some inter-trusted private or public clouds are federated to create a unified service platform with a large amount of hardware resources. In addition, an on-demand, pay-per-use model for Web-service-enabled HPC applications is proposed. Further, we provide an economic analysis of the proposed approach from the perspective of end users, cloud service providers, and Independent Software Vendors (ISVs). We conduct a simulation using two HPC application services on three federated clouds. A combined Quality of Service (QoS) and economic evaluation demonstrates a better effect of the proposed approach comparing with existing HPC platforms.