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Elastic High Performance Computing:What is E-HPC?

Last Updated:Dec 25, 2023

Elastic High Performance Computing (E-HPC) is a computing service provided by Alibaba Cloud. E-HPC delivers excellent and stable computing performance that is achieved by auto scaling. E-HPC aggregates computing capabilities and uses parallel computing to address major challenges in science, engineering, and commerce. E-HPC is used in a variety of fields, including scientific research, petroleum exploration, finance, weather forecast, pharmaceuticals, gene sequencing, and graphics processing.

Architecture

The following table describes the relationships between E-HPC and other services.

Alibaba Cloud service

Description

References

Elastic Compute Service (ECS)

Each E-HPC cluster consists of multiple ECS instances. These instances serve as logon nodes, management nodes, and compute nodes to provide different features.

  • Logon node: You can install, compile, and debug software, and submit jobs by using a logon node.

  • Management node: Management nodes are deployed on the scheduler server and domain account server.

    • Scheduler server: The scheduler server is used to run the scheduler client, manage scheduling nodes, and submit jobs.

    • Domain account server: A domain account server is used to manage the users in a cluster.

  • Compute Node: Compute nodes are used to run high-performance computing jobs. The overall performance of a cluster depends on the compute node settings.

A security group is a virtual firewall that provides Stateful Packet Inspection (SPI) and packet filtering capabilities. It can be used to isolate security domains on the cloud.

Virtual Private Cloud (VPC)

A VPC is a private network on the cloud. VPCs are logically isolated from each other. You can create and manage clusters in a VPC.

What is a VPC?

Elastic IP address (EIP)

By default, the logon node in a cluster is associated with an EIP, and is allocated a specific amount of public bandwidth to access the Internet.

What is an EIP?

Apsara File Storage NAS (NAS)

NAS provides a path to shared files for all nodes in a cluster.

What is Apsara File Storage NAS?

Object Storage Service (OSS)

You can use an OSS bucket to store your job data file and executable file. You can also import these files from an OSS bucket to a cluster.

What is Object Storage Service?

Features

The following table describes the features of E-HPC.

Feature

Description

References

Computing resource creation

Before you use E-HPC, you must create a cluster. Then, you can submit jobs, run jobs, and view job results in the cluster.

Computing resource configuration

E-HPC allows you to configure multiple computing resources, including users, nodes, scheduler queues and auto scaling settings.

Job submission

You can submit jobs to a cluster by using the E-HPC console. If you need to submit a small job, you can modify and submit the job script in the console. If you need to submit a complicated job, you can upload its job script to an OSS bucket and import the script to the console. You can also use an SSH client to log on to the cluster and submit jobs.

Performance analysis

The E-HPC optimizer is a performance monitoring and profiling platform. You can monitor cluster performance metrics, view cluster performance history, and profile performance hotspots.

View cluster performance

Virtual Network Computing (VNC)

You can use the VNC service to manage jobs in the E-HPC console.

Use VNC to manage a visualization service