Deployment of Virtual HPC Clusters on Demand from Volunteer Computing Resources

Abstract: Volunteer Computing allows individuals to provide their computing resources voluntarily to a community working towards a common goal. Therefore, universities and research institutions can use Volunteer Computing to pool their underlying computing infrastructure into a High Performance Computing (HPC) Cloud, which can later be used to deploy virtual HPC clusters on demand. These virtual HPC clusters allow researchers and scientists to run computationally large parallel applications in the HPC Cloud, which can elastically grow and shrink as per the requirements, at minimal costs. In this paper, we discuss a mechanism that can generate virtual HPC clusters on demand in the Cloud from the pooled Volunteer Computing resources.

Keywords: Cloud Computing; High Performance Computing; Cluster as a Service; HPC as a Service; Volunteer Computing