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NASA Missions to Benefit from New Cloud Computing Services11.13.2018
NASA-funded scientific and engineering projects will get a boost from a new cloud computing service that expands the agency’s range of high-performance computing (HPC) service offerings. Through a secure, managed cloud environment approach, the High-End Capability Computing (HECC) project operated by the NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) facility at NASA’s Ames Research Center and the NASA Center for Climate Simulation (NCCS) at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center will provide supported access to commercial cloud resources at Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and other commercial cloud providers.
As part of a phased approach, advanced users at NAS and NCCS are testing a cloud-bursting mechanism to seamlessly transfer jobs from on-premise supercomputers to run high-end computations and data analytics on AWS commercial cloud resources. From the on-premise HPC resources, users will be able to configure and schedule jobs to run in the cloud. Upon completion, the results will be copied back from the cloud to data storage located at the center from which the job was submitted.
In one successful case, researchers studying protoplanetary disks at the Carnegie Institution of Washington were able to increase the resolution of their 3D simulation by four times using NVIDIA V100 GPU compute nodes in AWS, compared to the same simulation run in 2016. The higher-resolution simulation revealed new details of spiral waves that rotate outward from the disk center, helping the researchers better understand the dynamics of planet formation. In addition, researchers obtained the improved results without increasing the amount of computing time, demonstrating the efficiency of the cloud-bursting approach.
A second use case involves analyzing high-resolution satellite images of the Earth to generate Digital Elevation Models (DEMs). For this application, strips of Earth imagery with a horizontal resolution of 50 centimeters are transferred to AWS, where compute nodes are provisioned to process the DEMs. Depending on the initial imagery, NASA researchers are generating DEMs at 8-meter, 2-meter, and even sub-1-meter resolutions. Given unpredictable algorithm convergence based on the input imagery, these types of jobs are difficult to schedule on traditional HPC systems. Therefore, using cloud-bursting enables more efficient turnaround times for the DEMs and more predictable job scheduling on local HPC resources.
NASA’s HPC cloud approach will leverage the procurement, account management and security services offered by the NASA Office of the Chief Information Officer’s Enterprise Management Cloud Computing Service Office at NASA Ames to provide access to commercial cloud resources.
A longer-term goal is to enable scientific and engineering communities supporting NASA missions to utilize commercial clouds to collaborate, disseminate vast amounts of data, test new machine learning and artificial algorithms using GPU architectures, and test applications on future supercomputing architectures. To that end, the NAS facility is aggressively working to release a fully integrated, sustainable environment, giving current HECC users access to commercial cloud resources in early 2019. The NCCS is also working on a science managed cloud environment to be made available for users in calendar year 2019.
The HECC Project provides world-class high-end computing, storage, and associated services to enable scientists and engineers supporting NASA missions to broadly and productively employ large-scale modeling, simulation, and analysis to achieve successful mission outcomes. Its mission is to accelerate and enhance NASA’s mission of space exploration, scientific discovery, and aeronautics research by continually ensuring optimal use of the most productive high-end computing environment in the world.
The NCCS provides HPC for NASA-sponsored scientists and engineers. Its integrated set of computational capabilities includes supercomputing, cloud computing, analytics, data sharing and tools, visualization, and climate data services. The purpose of the NCCS is to enhance NASA capabilities in Earth science, with an emphasis on weather and climate prediction, and to enable future scientific discoveries that will benefit humankind.
