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[Oliver Baltzer <oliver@xxxxxxxxx>]

> As a side note, HPC means very different things to different people. In
> the circles I move in, HPC is interested in running compute jobs that are
> CPU-intensive, require large amounts of memory, and need
> low-latency/high-bandwidth interconnects to allow the user to break up a
> tightly coupled compute job across multiple nodes.  A particular compute
> job will run for hours to days, so fast provisioning isn't necessarily
> critical (the traditional HPC model is to have your job wait in a batch
> queue until the resources are available).

I am interested in a model that supports all of the above, but individual
jobs have a very short lifespan (a few minutes) and are time critical
(every minute counts). Also, there is not necessarily a steady stream of
jobs, such that there are demand peaks (several times a day). 

In that model I do not want to wait minutes to provision compute nodes for
a job that runs 5 minutes. Neither do I want to run a cluster permanently
that has 100% utilization for maybe 2 or 3 hours in total per day. So a
cloud model would be quite attractive, if it could deliver the performance,
provision fast enough, and charge in minute intervals rather than hours.

Cheers,
Oliver