D2 3 Computing e-Infrastructure cost calculations and business _models_vam1-final

e-­‐FISCAL: www.efiscal.eu
EC Contract Number: 283449
In order to calculate the performance adjusted prices for comparing the in-­‐house HTC computing costs and Cloud
offerings these performance variations (for both best and worst case) are used.
HPC vs. Cloud benchmarking
The results of the benchmarking exercise that refer to the comparison of the in-­‐house HPC instances (i.e. Stokes
HPC system) against the Amazon EC2 HPC instances were included in D2.2. The following Table 12 provides a
comparison of the benchmark results for both in-­‐house and EC2 HPC instances using the NAS Parallel Benchmark
(NPB) MPI and OMP variants.
Benchmark
EC2 average performance
degradation VS. HPC in %
EC2 range of
performance variations
VS. HPC in %
NPB MPI – Class B -­‐ 48.42 -­‐ 1.02 to -­‐ 67.76
NPB OMP – Class B -­‐ 37.26 -­‐ 16.18 to -­‐58.93
Table 12: EC2 HPC VS. Stokes HPC instance @ ICHEC
The MPI and OMP variants of NPB are chosen to address the most common parallelism techniques used within
the HPC community. Although, medium sized problem (i.e. Class B) was chosen for various NPB kernels (i.e. BT,
CG, EP, FT, IS, LU, MG and SP), the individual kernels significantly vary in size and type to cover various aspects of a
real-­‐world parallel/HPC application. One may argue that Class B would not be a real representative in terms of
scale for a typical HPC/parallel application. But, the fact of the matter is that our objective and scope (as
highlighted in the methodology section) is to identify the performance variations across EC2 and in-­‐house HPC
infrastructures. Of course, benchmarking a typical large-­‐scale parallel/HPC application would yield more accurate
results but would also require significant resources. Nevertheless, the performance variations (in Table 12) are
quite evident even with Class B problem. In order to calculate the performance adjusted prices for comparing the
in-­‐house HTC computing costs and Cloud offerings these performance variations are used.
Therefore, the outcomes of the benchmarking exercise were used in an attempt to compare like with like services.
More specifically, the loss in performance has been embedded in the calculations as follows: Price x (1+ % loss in
performance). For example, the price for the on demand instances per core hour for M/L/XL standard instances is
€0.064/ core hour. By taking into account a performance degradation of 27% (as evidenced in the benchmarking
exercise) the performance-­‐adjusted price goes to € 0.081 [(0.064 + (1+0.27)) = 0.081]
By comparing the cost per core hour for 2011 streaming from e-­‐FISCAL calculations (Basic Case) and the Amazon
performance adjusted prices for Standard M/L/XL instances -­‐ Linux per core hour we get the following results.
The performance degradation used to adjust the prices of Standard M/L/XL instances is 27%
e-­‐FISCAL : Financial Study for Sustainable Computing e-­‐Infrastructures
Deliverable D2.3 – Computing e-­‐Infrastructures cost estimation and analysis – Pricing and
Business models
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