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The distinction between "supercomputer" and "enterprise cloud" is nearly meaningless now that a cloud compute instance is considered in the top 500 fastest supe

• semi-extrinsic 7y ago
  I don't think it's anywhere near "meaningless". The fact that a team of software engineers who are led by someone extremely well experienced in HPC (since the early 90s, multiple awards won, etc.) can do this, does not mean it is easy for a typical university or engineering company to do the same. Will HPC migrate towards the cloud? Maybe yes, but we need several major overhauls to tooling before that is anywhere close to happening. Just think about how much work it would be today to configure a Packer image that has several MPI libraries, a scheduler like SLURM, various Python versions + required packages, C and Fortran compilers, BLAS/LAPACK/etc, VCS systems, integration with some sort of user authentication system including support for SSH login to each node as well as linked for each user to the accounting in the scheduling system, and to have confidence that it will be highly performant for the application you work with on the AWS allocation that you have requested. Not many people could pull that off in a reasonable amount of time, if at all.