M. Keller

Virtualized HPC: a contradiction in terms?

System virtualization has become the enabling technology to manage the increasing number of different applications inside data centers. The abstraction from the underlying hardware and the provision of multiple virtual machines (VM) on a single physical server have led to a consolidation and more efficient usage of physical servers. The abstraction from the hardware also eases the provision of applications on different data centers, as applied in several cloud computing environments. In this case, the application need not adapt to the environment of the cloud computing provider, but can travel around with its own VM image, including its own operating system and libraries. System virtualization and cloud computing could also be very attractive in the context of high‐performance computing (HPC). Today, HPC centers have to cope with both, the management of the infrastructure and also the applications. Virtualization technology would enable these centers to focus on the infrastructure, while the users, collaborating inside their virtual organizations (VOs), would be able to provide the software. Nevertheless, there seems to be a contradiction between HPC and cloud computing, as there are very few successful approaches to virtualize HPC centers. This work discusses the underlying reasons, including the management and performance, and presents solutions to overcome the contradiction, including a set of new libraries. The viability of the presented approach is shown based on evaluating a selected parallel, scientific application in a virtualized HPC environment. Copyright

eScience Cloud Infrastructure

Grid computing enables access to high performance computing resources by offering unified interfaces to compute facilities of distributed compute centers. These compute centers are limited in personal capacity and in support capabilities for different communities/VOs. This work presents a solution to this management problem by facilitating the natural interface introduced by virtualization to separate hardware and application provisioning. Any eScience community may provide preconfigured applications within virtual machine images and compute centers run these without having to maintain applications. This is similar to the Infrastructure as a Service and Software as a Service known from cloud computing. Additionally, in contrast to the state of the art in grid computing, we propose a scalable process to maintain compute resources for scientific users, including the definition of a chain of trust between users and compute centers, which simplifies the addition of communities and resources. As a result, this paper lays the foundation for a next-generation eScience Cloud improving the accessibility of compute resources for research and industry.

Advances in understanding the relation between reservoir properties and facies distribution in the Paleozoic Wajid Sandstone, Saudi Arabia

The Wajid Sandstone is one of the most important groundwater reservoirs in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The knowledge of the dimensions and the distribution of its sedimentary facies are essential for high quality reservoir interpretation. Hitherto, the facies and their dimensions are only roughly known from extrapolation of subcrop data and geophysical surveys.