Performance Analysis of High Performance Computing Applications on the Amazon Web Services Cloud

Cloud computing has seen tremendous growth, particularly for commercial web applications. The on-demand, pay-as-you-go model creates a flexible and cost-effective means to access compute resources. For these reasons, the scientific computing community has shown increasing interest in exploring cloud computing. However, the underlying implementation and performance of clouds are very different from those at traditional supercomputing centers. It is therefore critical to evaluate the performance of HPC applications in today's cloud environments to understand the trade-offs inherent in migrating to the cloud. This paper represents the most comprehensive evaluation to date comparing conventional HPC platforms to Amazon EC2, using real applications representative of the workload at a typical supercomputing center.