Benchmarking Bare Metal Cloud Servers for HPC Applications

Cloud Computing is an ever-growing paradigm shift in computing allowing user's commodity access to compute and storage services. As such cloud computing is an emerging promising approach for High Performance Computing (HPC) application development. Automation of resource provision offered by Cloud computing facilitates the eScience programmer usage of computing and storage resources. Currently, there are many commercial services for compute, storage, network and many others from big name companies. However, these services typically do not have performance guarantees associated with them. This results in unexpected performance degradation of user's applications that can be somewhat random to the user. In order to overcome this, a user must be well versed in the tools and technologies that drive Cloud Computing. One of the state of the art cloud systems, is a cloud system that provides bare metal server instances on demand. Unlike traditional cloud servers, bare metal cloud servers are free from virtualization overheads, and thus promise to be more suitable for HPC applications. In this paper, we present our study on the performance and scalability of Open stack based bare metal cloud servers, using a popular HPC benchmark suite. Our experiments conducted at UTSA Open Cloud Institute's cloud system with 200 cores demonstrate excellent scaling performance of bare metal cloud servers.