Monte Carlo performance study of virtual high performance computing cluster over cloud

Abstract

Objective: As a high computation cost discipline, nuclear science and engineering still relies heavily on traditional high performance computing (HPC) clusters. However, the usage of traditional HPC for nuclear science and engineering has been limited due to the poor flexibility, the software compatibility and the poor user interfaces. Virtualized/virtual HPC (vHPC) can mimic an HPC by using a cloud computing platform. In this work, we designed and developed a vHPC system for employment in nuclear engineering. Methods: The system is tested using the computation of the number π by Monte Carlo and an X-ray digital imaging system simulation. The performance of the vHPC system is compared with that of the traditional HPCs. Results: As the number of the simulated particles increases, the virtual cluster computing time grows proportionally. The time used for the simulation of the X-ray imaging was about 21.1 ​h over a 12 kernels virtual server. Experimental results show that the performance of virtual cluster computing and the actual physical machine is almost the same. Conclusions: From these tests, it is concluded that vHPC is a good alternative for employing in nuclear engineering. The proposed vHPC in this paper will make HPC flexible and easy to deploy.

Keywords

• Cloud computing
• Virtualization
• High performance computing (HPC)
• Virtual HPC
• Monte Carlo