Comparison of HPC and Cloud Environments for Developing Energy Efficient Services

Abstract

The paper presents the characteristics and a comparison of HPC and cloud computing environments in the context of building and deploying services that support energy efficiency. The analysis covers typical hardware configurations, types of workloads (taking into account domain-specific features, application and software requirements), as well as the characteristics of use cases based on CPUs, GPUs, and their combinations. The scale of resource utilization and task execution performance in both environments is also discussed. The authors consider these aspects in the context of the potential migration and adaptation of the DEPO (Dynamic Energy-Performance Optimizer) software from an HPC environment to a cloud environment, with particular emphasis on performance-energy optimization. The paper also discusses the limitations resulting from differences between these environments and presents the hardware-software configurations in the cloud environment supported by the proposed cloud-based variant of the DEPO software.