The Vector Computing Cloud: Toward a Vector Meta-Computing Environment

Aiming at realizing a high performance computing (HPC) cloud with vector supercomputers, this paper presents the world’s first prototype of wide-area vector meta computing infrastructure named a vector computing cloud by virtualizing remote vector computing resources as an HPC service over the Internet. The prototype system consists of two remote NEC SX-9 nodes connected through a long fat-pipe network (LFN), and each node is located at Tohoku University and Osaka University with a distance of 800 km. The vector computing cloud also provides a single sign on environment and jobs are automatically assigned to appropriate sites. Wide-area co-operation of distributed vector supercomputers is realized by adopting the NAREGI Grid Middleware, and a virtual machine for NEC SX vector supercomputer series, job scheduling algorithms, and an MPI operating environment are newly developed to enhance the job and resource management capabilities of the NAREGI Grid Middleware. In addition, to achieve fairness and efficient job scheduling on the vector computing cloud, this paper presents a history-based job scheduling mechanism for a queue system. Based on the estimation, the job scheduling mechanism automatically allocates the job to an appropriate site, which can execute the job earlier. The operation tests and experiment results indicate that the prototype system realizes single sign on for multiple vector resources and has enough potential for transparently operating jobs between the two SX-9 systems. This paper also evaluates and discusses the performance of the proposed job scheduling mechanism and MPI operation between both SX-9 systems using the High Performance Linpack (HPL) benchmark.