Using NAS Parallel Benchmarks to evaluate HPC performance in clouds

Cloud computing is a reality nowadays, however there are few studies trying to understand what happens in the actual cloud infrastructures for HPC applications. The focus of this study is the evaluation of NAS Parallel Benchmarks on cloud computing environments. We analyze the execution of applications from NAS Parallel Benchmarks (LU and SP), comparing the execution behavior in different infrastructures: a public cloud, a private cloud and a NUMA multiprocessor system. Our broad goal is to estimate the performance of actual HPC applications on cloud, based on its communication characteristics. We conclude that HPC users should be careful with Virtual Machines with higher virtual CPU count, thanks to Google usage of Hyper-Threading technology and Virtual Machine instances scheduling.