Ladies and gentlemen, I have the pleasure to welcome you here today for the cloud session,
which does not fit to the weather we have outside, so we removed all the windows from
here, and we believe we have some interesting discussions.
We hope you can all join in.
My name is Dieter Kansselmuller, I'm from the University of Munich, and I'm also a member
of the board of the Leibniz Supercomputing Center, and I have the pleasure to introduce
my co-chair, Martin Anthony Walker, he's an independent consultant, used to work for
HP, and he will give you some introductory slides for our session today.
Thank you, Dieter.
So cloud computing is a subject that's attracted a great deal of attention over the past year,
and of course in the high-performance computing community, it raises the question to what
extent cloud computing can be used in our domain of supercomputing.
So we put this session together.
There are, I think, two very powerful arguments in favor of the evolution towards cloud computing
that involve both technology and economics, and it has to do with the way that computing
and storage are resourced for applications across all areas of information technology.
The first of these is automation and virtualization, and these two technologies have the virtue
of abstracting away much of the complexity of managing and using very large configurations
of computers and storage.
They can, for example, greatly increase the efficiency with which information technology
resources are used.
You may, you have probably heard that in industry and commerce, typically only about 15 percent
of the available cycles are doing actual useful work.
That fraction is typically much higher in high-performance computing centers because
supercomputing centers typically are heavily oversubscribed.
But certainly in the business and commercial world, making more effective use of the equipment
that's installed is a great advantage.
The second point has to do with economies of scale.
You may well imagine that if you place an order for, let's say, a few hundred thousand
servers with a vendor, then that vendor is going to be prepared to consider a request
that you might make for some specific modifications, and you're also likely to get a very good
price.
You're going to have considerably more leverage on the manufacturer than if you were ordering
a few tens or a few hundreds of servers.
The other point is that if very large numbers of amounts of information technology equipment,
large numbers of servers and large amounts of storage are put into a single data center,
then there are tremendous opportunities for optimizing the way in which those devices
are powered and cooled, and it makes a lot of sense, as we have seen over the last couple
of years, to put very large data centers in places where it's relatively inexpensive
and effective to power and cool them.
And then the resources available in these very large centers can be offered with a very
simple business model, basically pay as you go.
And I think these arguments are almost overwhelming, and they are the reason, I think, why cloud
computing is the hottest topic in information technology today.
But when we come to talk about high performance computing, there are some other considerations
having to do with performance.
Of course, we need to have data that's being processed needs to be close to the machines
that are doing the processing, and whether one moves the data to the computing or the
computing to the data, that's an open question.
But in any case, you want the data to be nearby.
If you have to go across a continent to fetch an item of data, that's a very expensive operation.
Similar considerations apply within a machine itself.
One really needs to have very high performance communications within the machine to minimize
the latency with which data is fetched and increase and maximize the bandwidth with which
the data can be shifted.
And so one of the primary purposes of this session is to assess whether one can find
some synergy between the requirements for performance and the benefits of economies
of scale and green computing automation and virtualization.
So we've decided, we've organized this session with a number of perspectives on cloud computing.
We have two information technology vendors, HP and Sun Microsystems.
We had invited IBM, but unfortunately, David Torek is unable to join us this morning.
Then we have a perspective from a supercomputing center, the Ulish supercomputing center here
in Germany, perspective from the software industry, Microsoft, then from three companies
that are actively involved in the business of cloud computing, Google, Amazon and Yahoo.
And we're going to close the session with a panel discussion.
And we had originally thought that the panel discussion, we would just have the software,
but we've decided it's probably more equitable to have everybody involved.
And so they will be, at the end of the session, all of the speakers will be there to field
your questions.
So the program is that we're going to start with three talks before the break from HP,
from Sun and from the Ulish supercomputing center.
Then we'll have an hour's break from about 10.25 to 11.25.
Following the break, we'll have speakers from Microsoft, from Google, Amazon and Yahoo.
And then, as I mentioned, we'll close with the panel discussion.
So thank you very much for coming.
And I now turn to my co-chair, Dieter Kransel-Miller, to introduce the first speaker.