High performance computing and simulation: Architectures, systems, algorithms, technologies, services, and applications

Intensive computing and numerical simulation are now essential tools that contribute to the success in systems designs, effectiveness of public policies such as prevention of natural hazards and taking account of climate risks, but also to security and national sovereignty. There are indications that the scientific community is technologically ready for the implementation of private HPC clouds, although a full HPC cloud solution running on virtual machines (VM) may remain application dependent. The possibility of having HPC cloud computing brings fast-compute clusters within the reach of researchers and users for whom traditional HPC facilities are not a choice. For example, with the BiG Grid HPC Cloud, users get access to a virtualized HPC Cluster that they can configure to exactly match their needs. Still, it provides self-service and dynamically scalable high performance computing facilities.