Magellan Final Report - Office of Science - U.S. Department of Energy

Magellan Final Report
2.1.4 Hardware as a Service
Hardware as a Service (HaaS) is also known as “bare-metal provisioning.” The main distinction between
this model and IaaS is that the user-provided operating system software stack is provisioned onto the raw
hardware, allowing the users to provide their own custom hypervisor, or to avoid virtualization completely,
along with the performance impact of virtualization of high-performance hardware such as InfiniBand. The
other difference between HaaS and the other service models is that the user “leases” the entire resource; it
is not shared with other users within a virtual space. With HaaS, the service provider owns the equipment
and is responsible for housing, running, and maintaining it. HaaS provides many of the advantages of IaaS
and enables greater levels of control on the hardware configuration.
2.2 Deployment Models
According to the NIST definition, clouds can have one of the following deployment models, depending on
how the cloud infrastructure is operated: (a) public, (b) private, (c) community, or (d) hybrid.
Public Cloud. Public clouds refer to infrastructure provided to the general public by a large industry selling
cloud services. Amazon’s cloud offering would fall in this category. These services are on a pay-as-you-go
basis and can usually be purchased using a credit card.
Private Cloud. A private cloud infrastructure is operated solely for a particular organization and has specific
features that support a specific group of policies. Cloud software stacks such as Eucalyptus, OpenStack,
and Nimbus are used to provide virtual machines to the user. In this context, Magellan can be considered a
private cloud that provides its services to DOE Office of Science users.
Community Cloud. A community cloud infrastructure is shared by several organizations and serves the
needs of a special community that has common goals. FutureGrid [32] can be considered a community cloud.
Hybrid Cloud. Hybrid clouds refer to two or more cloud infrastructures that operate independently but
are bound together by technology compliance to enable application portability.
2.3 Other Related Efforts
The Magellan project explored a range of topics that included evaluating current private cloud software and
understanding gaps and limitations, application software setup, etc. To the best of our knowledge, there
is no prior work that does such an exhaustive study of various aspects of cloud computing for scientific
applications.
The FutureGrid project [32] provides a testbed, including a geographically distributed set of heterogeneous
computing systems, that includes cloud resources. The aim of the project is to provide a capability
that makes it possible for researchers to tackle complex research challenges in computer science, whereas
Magellan is more focused on serving the needs of the science.
A number of different groups have conducted feasibility and benchmarking studies of running their
scientific applications in the Amazon cloud [67, 40, 15, 52, 53, 51]. Standard benchmarks have also been
evaluated on Amazon EC2 [62, 23, 66, 74, 82]. These studies complement our own experiments which show
that high-end, tightly coupled applications are impacted by the performance characteristics of current cloud
environments.
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