Apparently, what I proposed previously in the speculation is so realizable that a company actually makes a product about it. :) The company that I'm talking about is "Penguin Computing" . Penguin computing offers "HPC as a Service" that is specifically designed to bring HPC customers to the Cloud. POD is a HPC system in the cloud but NO VIRTUALIZATION technology is used. No virtualization is needed to ensure the performance of their HPC applications is optimal because each customer will have its dedicated PHYSICAL servers to run their HPC application.
You might wonder how this "HPC as a Service" related to my previous posts. Firstly, the "HPC as a Service" allows the HPC customers to run their HPC tasks in the Cloud. Customers are unaware about if their tasks are ran on specific designated resources but they are guaranteed to have the performance they need. Secondly, they provide multi-core virtualization MANUALLY. From the website, it says
"Experts in high-performance computing help setup and optimize the software environment and can help trouble-shoot issues that might occur."That is if the HPC task doesn't perform as expected, the HPC experts will help the customers to optimize their tasks to run on the specific hardware to take advantage of the hardware resource. Unlike other type of applications that are aimed for high-throughput, HPC tasks are usually long-running algorithms processed in parallel, with the result of one task not dependent on the other tasks. The level of sophistication in this type of task is high and therefore, it has to be fine-tune manually. Although, it doesn't provide the same "virtualization" that I mentioned in the previous post but this is very close to the idea because someone (in this case, the HPC experts) takes care of the messy details about Computing.
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