Evaluation of the Performance of Tightly Coupled Parallel Solvers and MPI Communications in IaaS From the Public Cloud

IaaS from the public cloud is becoming a new option for organizations in need of HPC capabilities. IaaS offers greater flexibility in hardware choices and operational costs. Furthermore, IaaS enables small organizations to access resources previously reserved for organizations with larger capitals. This article uses the HPCG benchmark to assess the performance of parallel solvers, which are critical in computational engineering, and microbenchmarks to measure collective MPI operations. The benchmarks encompass IaaS from five cloud vendors (AWS, Google Cloud Platform, Azure, Oracle CIoud Infrastructure, and Packet), and two architectures, ARM and x86_64. The benchmarks cover clusters with up to 4500 cores and illustrate the benefits of higher network bandwidth when scaling up clusters. The results for some of the clusters are particularly promising as they exhibit good scalability and compare well to on-premises supercomputers. Additionally, the study includes a preliminary cost estimate based on on-demand prices for IaaS computational power and memory.