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Re: Openstack and Google Compute Engine

 

Firstly, I'm just curious about their technology. I'm unable to make any
representative benchmark and that's why I was asking you about it. I'm just
a student during master thesis, interested in cloud computing, Openstack
etc. so I can't afford for such huge deployment :).

Secondly, I don't think we shouldn't compare GCE to Openstack. I understand
that right now cloud (Openstack, Amazon, ...) is just easy in use, managed
and scalable datacenter. It allows users to create VMs, upload their
images, easily increase their (limited) demands, but don't you think that
HPC is the right direction? I've always thought that final cloud's goal is
to provide easy in use HPC infrastructure. Where users could do what they
can do right now in the clouds (Amazon, Openstack), but also could do what
they couldn't do in typical datacenter. They should run instance, run
compute-heavy software and if they need more resources, they just add them.
if cloud is unable to provide necessary resources, they should move their
app to bigger cloud and do what they need. Openstack should be prepared for
such large deployment. It should also be prepared for HPC use cases. Or if
it's not prepared yet, it should be Openstack's goal.

I know that clouds are fulfilling current needs for scalable datacenter,
but it should also fulfill future needs. Apps are faster and faster. More
often they do image processing, voice recognition, data mining and it
should be clouds' goal to provide an easy way to create such advanced apps,
not just simple web server which could be scaled up, by adding few VMs and
load balancer to redirect requests. Infrastructure should be prepared even
for such large deployment like that in google. It should also be optimized
and support heavy computations. In the future it should be as efficient as
grids (or almost as efficient), because ease of use has already been
achieved. If, right now, it's easy to deploy VM into the cloud, the next
step should be to optimize infrastructure to increase performance.

I've always thought about clouds in that way. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe
cloud should do only what it's doing right now and let to others
technologies handle HPC.

Cheers,

On Tue, Jul 3, 2012 at 12:55 AM, Paul McMillan <Paul.McMillan@xxxxxxxxxx>wrote:

> It's KVM on Redhat with a fairly custom guest kernel, including optimized
> drivers for their network encapsulation. Auth is handled using their
> existing OAuth2.0 infrastructure.
>
> As Matt said, their offering is fairly different from EC2 (and Openstack),
> competing more with compute-heavy providers, rather than amazon-like
> application-host offerings.
>
> Their beta is currently only available to customers that they expect will
> run real jobs. Expect a phone call and a conversation about your
> application and current compute use before your organization gets an invite.
>
> One neat thing about their product is that they provide dedicated spindles
> on ephemeral disks for instances with more than 2 cores.
>
> Their user tooling looks very nice. There are probably features worth
> borrowing there.
>
> -Paul
>
>
>
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-- 
Simon**

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