Updated on 2023-10-16 GMT+08:00

What's HPC-S²?

High-performance computing (HPC) is the practice of aggregating a large number of compute nodes to work concurrently to solve large-scale computing problems. It has been widely used in scientific research, weather forecast, simulation experiment, biopharmaceuticals, gene sequencing, and image processing.

The requirements for high-performance computing have been increasingly growing. HUAWEI CLOUD launched the HPC Solution Service (HPC-S²) to provide highly scalable high-performance computing resources as a cloud service. With basic services and software pre-integrated, HPC-S² allows you to provision and deploy HPC resources with just a few clicks. HPC-S² can automatically deploy job scheduling software such as Simple Linux Utility for Resource Management (Slurm) and Sun Grid Engine (SGE) to facilitate task assignments on parallel computers. On the HPC-S² console, you can view and manage clusters, nodes, and shared storage in an intuitive way.

You can also use the HPC-S² console to manage multiple clusters in different VPCs, as shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1 HPC-S² architecture

HPC-S² Functions

The HPC-S² console provides functions such as cluster management, node management, and shared storage management.

Function

Description

Cluster management

Create HPC clusters, view cluster creation, deployment, scale-in/out progress, view details about HPC clusters, and adding, starting, stopping, and removing clusters.

Node management

Query, start, stop, restart, and delete nodes in HPC clusters.

Shared storage management

Provide storage for HPC clusters by using Scalable File Service (SFS).

HPC-S² Advantages

Compared with traditional HPC, HPC-S² offers the following advantages:

  • HPC resources are provisioned on demand and are available instantly upon provisioning.
  • Multiple types of cloud servers are available for you to choose the most appropriate compute servers for your workloads.
  • HPC-S² can work with security services, such as Anti-DDoS, Web Application Firewall (WAF), and Vulnerability Scan Service (VSS), to provide multi-dimensional protection to improve data security and availability.
  • With HPC-S², you do not need to build your own equipment rooms or worry about hardware upgrade or replacement. You can obtain resources for exclusive use from virtual resource pools anytime and these resources can be elastically scaled based on service changes.
  • HPC-S² can automatically configure password-free login, network information services (NISs), and schedulers for users.