In Jisc's future of cloud computing horizon scan report, we identified three strategic areas where Jisc could support universities and colleges in moving to the cloud – cloud as a utility, app as a service, and working to build capability in cloud technologies. Come along to this session to hear more about this work from Jisc futurist Martin Hamilton, and find out how you can get involved.

1. Cloud present, future & trajectory
Global Scientific Computing
*Does not apply to mathematicians with specialties in Cantorian set theory who should immediately ask for a copy of my very long disclaimer.

2. We are Psycho SciCo

3. Sci Co SciCo
Science is one of the greatest areas of
computation
Amazon
huge, really disruptive, impact
what we are about

4. “… the online book and decorative pillow seller Amazon.com
swooped in and, in 2006, launched its own computer rental system—
the future Amazon Web Services. The once-fledgling service has
since turned cloud computing into a mainstream phenomenon …”
Source: Bloomberg Business - April 22, 2015
$7B retail business
10,000 employees
A whole lot of
servers
2006 2015
Every day, AWS
adds enough server
capacity to power
this $7B enterprise

5. Existing
1. Oregon
2. California
3. Virginia
4. Dublin
5. Frankfurt
6. Singapore
7. Sydney
8. Seoul
9. Tokyo
10. Sao Paulo
11. Beijng
12. US GovCloud
1. Ohio
2. India
3. UK
4. Canada
5. China+1
AWS Region
Availability Zone
regions are sovereign your data never
leaves

7. Map of scientific collaboration between researchers - Olivier H. Beauchesne - http://bit.ly/e9ekP2
Science means Collaboration

10. Cray Supercomputer

11. Beowulf Cluster

12. A top500 supercomputer

13. Wall clock time: ~1 hour Wall clock time: ~1 week
Cost: the same

14. Cost Control & Budgeting

15. Spot Bid Advisor
The Spot Bid Advisor
analyzes Spot price history
to help you determine a bid
price that suits your needs.
You should weigh your
application’s tolerance for
interruption and your cost
saving goals when selecting
a Spot instance and bid
price.
The lower your frequency of
being outbid, the longer
your Spot instances are
likely to run without
interruption.
https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/spot/bid-advisor/
Bid Price & Savings
Your bid price affects your
ranking when it comes to
acquiring resources in the
SPOT market, and is the
maximum price you will pay.
But frequently you’ll pay a
lot less.

16. When you only pay for what you use …
• If you’re only able to use your compute, say, 30%
of the time, you only pay for that time.
1
Pocket the savings
• Buy chocolate
• Buy a spectrometer
• Hire a scientist.
2 Go faster
• Use 3x the cores to
run your jobs at 3x
the speed.
3
Go Large
• Do 3x the science,
or consume 3x the
data.
…youhaveoptions.

17. AWS - Frankfurt
EC2
S3
over (Janet/GÉANT)
research network
over commercial
internet
----- Data egress
----- Not data egress
inter-
region
Data egress
waiver applies
Data egress is: data transferredout fromAWS,
over the Internet, tothe end user
AWS – Dublin

18. Global Data Egress Waiver



 Excludes MOOCs or other
egress-as-a-service situations
 Must use a Research Network
we peer with (e.g. Janet or
GÉANT)
Who
 Contract addendum required
 Can also procure through reseller (e.g. Arcus)
 Waives data egress charges
from qualified accounts
 Capped at waiving no more
than 15% of the customer’s bill
What
How
 Researchers strongly need predictable budgetsWhy

19. 39 years of computational chemistry in 9 hours
Novartis ran a project that involved virtually screening 10 million
compounds against a common cancer target in less than a week. They
calculated that it would take 50,000 cores and close to a $40 million
investment if they wanted to run the experiment internally.
Partnering with Cycle Computing and Amazon Web
Services (AWS), Novartis built a platform thst ran
across 10,600 Spot Instances (~87,000 cores) and
allowed Novartis to conduct 39 years of
computational chemistry in 9 hours for a cost of
$4,232. Out of the 10 million compounds screened,
three were successfully identified.

20. CHILES will produce the first HI deep field, to be carried out with the VLA in B
array and covering a redshift range from z=0 to z=0.45. The field is centered
at the COSMOS field. It will produce neutral hydrogen images of at least 300
galaxies spread over the entire redshift range.
The team at ICRAR in Australia have been able to implement the entire
processing pipeline in the cloud for around $2,000 per month by exploiting the
SPOT market, which means the $1.75M they otherwise needed to spend on
an HPC cluster can be spent on way cooler things that impact their research
… like astronomers.

21. not
http://blog.csiro.au/wtf-is-that-how-were-trawling-the-universe-for-the-unknown/
WTF’s cloud-based backend is hosted on
Amazon Web Services servers, where the
researchers are able to access software for
data reduction, calibration and viewing right
from their desktop. The team is currently
issuing a challenge using data peppered
with “EMU (Easter) Eggs” – objects that
might pose a challenge to data mining
algorithms.
This way they hope to train the system to
recognise things that systematically depart
from known categories of astronomical
objects, to help better prepare for
unanticipated discoveries that would
otherwise remain hidden.

22. “The Zooniverse is heavily reliant on Amazon Web
Services (AWS), particularly Elastic Compute
Cloud (EC2) virtual private servers and Simple
Storage Service (S3) data storage. AWS is the
most cost-effective solution for the dynamic needs
of Zooniverse’s infrastructure …”
http://wwwconference.org/proceedings/www2014/companion/p1049.pdf
The World’s Largest Citizen Science Platform
… cost is a factor – running a central API means that when the Zooniverse is quiet and
there aren’t many people about we can scale back the number of servers we’re running
(automagically on Amazon Web Services) to a minimal level.

23. C4Intel Xeon E5-2666 v3, custom built for AWS.
Intel Haswell, 16 FLOPS/tick
2.9 GHz, turbo to 3.5 GHz
http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/c4-instances.html
Feature Specification
Processor Number E5-2666 v3
Intel® Smart Cache 25 MiB
Instruction Set 64-bit
Instruction Set Extensions AVX 2.0
Lithography 22 nm
Processor Base Frequency 2.9 GHz
Max All Core Turbo Frequency 3.2 GHz
Max Turbo Frequency 3.5 GHz (available on c4.2xLarge)
Intel® Turbo Boost Technology 2.0
Intel® vPro Technology Yes
Intel® Hyper-Threading Technology Yes
Intel® Virtualization Technology (VT-x) Yes
Intel® Virtualization Technology for Directed
I/O (VT-d)
Yes
Intel® VT-x with Extended Page Tables (EPT) Yes
Intel® 64 Yes

24. cfnCluster - provision an HPC cluster in minutes
#cfncluster
https://github.com/awslabs/cfncluster
cfncluster is a sample code framework that deploys and maintains clusters on AWS. It is reasonably
agnostic to what the cluster is for and can easily be extended to support different frameworks. The
CLI is stateless, everything is done using CloudFormation or resources within AWS.
10minutes
http://boofla.io/u/cfnCluster – (Boof’s HOWTO slides)

26. Head
node
Instance
Compute
node
Instance
Compute
node
Instance
Compute
node
Instance
Compute
node
Instance
10G Network
Auto-scaling group
Virtual Private Cloud
/shared
Head Instance
2 or more cores (as needed)
CentOS 6.x
OpenMPI, gcc etc…
Choice of scheduler:
Torque, SGE, OpenLava, Slurm
Compute Instances
2 or more cores (as needed)
CentOS 6.x
Auto Scaling group driven by scheduler queue length.
Can start with 0 (zero) nodes and only scale when there
are jobs.
It's a real cluster

27. Infrastructure as code
#cfncluster
The creation process might take a few minutes (maybe
up to 5 mins or so, depending on how you configured it.
Because the API to Cloud Formation (the service that
does all the orchestration) is asynchronous, we can kill
the terminal session if we wanted to and watch the whole
show from the AWS console (where you’ll find it all under
the “Cloud Formation”dashboard in the events tab for this
stack.
$ cfnCluster create boof-cluster
Starting: boof-cluster
Status: cfncluster-boof-cluster - CREATE_COMPLETE Output:"MasterPrivateIP"="10.0.0.17"
Output:"MasterPublicIP"="54.66.174.113"
Output:"GangliaPrivateURL"="http://10.0.0.17/ganglia/"
Output:"GangliaPublicURL"="http://54.66.174.113/ganglia/"

28. This cluster intentionally left blank.
Your cluster is ephemeral.
Yes, that’s right, you’ve created a disposable cluster.
But it’s 100% recyclable.
It’s worth noting that anything you put into this cluster will
vaporize when you issue the command
$ cfncluster delete <your cluster name>
… which might not be what you first expect.
It’s easy to save your data tho, and pick up from where you
left off later.
Before you delete your cluster, take a snapshot of the EBS
(block storage) volume that you used for your /shared
filesystem using the AWS EC2 console (see the pic on the
right).
The EBC volume you care most about is the one attached to
the headnode instance (hint: it’s probably the largest one).

29. How do I join the Data Egress Waiver Program?


Peter Meagher
AWS Europe
meagherp@amazon.co.uk

30. How will this impact me?
 Simple, predictable budgets
 Discount
 Retrieving data
 Tailored to academia: We understand that predictable budgets are important because of how
research funding works. And we know that National Research and Education Networks provide most
research institutions with a reliable, fast network connection to the AWS cloud for your compute and
big data needs.
 Volume Discount: AWS will apply the waiver to your institution’s aggregated AWS account, which
averages out data egress use – and gives you access to further volume discounts.


