High-performance computing

The first production deployment of OpenStack outside NASA and Rackspace was at a Canadian not-for-profit organization named Cybera. Cybera deployed OpenStack as a technology platform in 2011 for its DAIR program, which provides free compute and storage to Canadian researchers, entrepreneurs, and small businesses.

Architects at Cybera, NASA, and CERN have all commented on how their services have much of the same concerns as in the public hosting space. They provide compute and storage resources to researchers and don't have much insight into how those resources will actually be used. Thus, concerns about secure multitenancy will apply to these environments just as much as they do in the hosting space.

HPC clouds will have an added focus on performance, though. Although hosting providers will look to economize on commodity hardware, research clouds will look to maximize performance by configuring their compute, storage, and network hardware to support high volume and throughput operations. Where most clouds will work best by growing low-to-mid range hardware horizontally with commodity hardware, high-performance clouds tend to be very specific about the performance profiles of their hardware selection. Cybera has published performance benchmarks, comparing its DAIR platform to EC2. Architects of research clouds may also look to use hardware pass-through capabilities or other low-level hypervisor features to enable specific workloads.