HPC as a Service: A naïve model

Applications like Big Data, Machine Learning, Deep Learning and even other Engineering and Scientific research requires a lot of computing power; making High-Performance Computing (HPC) an important field. But access to Supercomputers is out of range from the majority. Nowadays Supercomputers are actually clusters of computers usually made-up of commodity hardware. Such clusters are called Beowulf Clusters. The history of which goes back to 1994 when NASA built a Supercomputer by creating a cluster of commodity hardware. In recent times a lot of effort has been done in making HPC Clusters of even single board computers (SBCs). Although the creation of clusters of commodity hardware is possible but is a cumbersome task. Moreover, the maintenance of such systems is also difficult and requires special expertise and time. The concept of cloud is to provide on-demand resources that can be services, platform or even infrastructure and this is done by sharing a big resource pool. Cloud computing has resolved problems like maintenance of hardware and requirement of having expertise in networking etc. An effort is made of bringing concepts from cloud computing to HPC in order to get benefits of cloud. The main target is to create a system which can develop a capability of providing computing power as a service which to further be referred to as Supercomputer as a service. A prototype was made using Raspberry Pi (RPi) 3B and 3B+ Single Board Computers. The reason for using RPi boards was increasing popularity of ARM processors in the field of HPC.