Cloud HPC strategies and performance for FEM

Abstract: High precision results for large scientific problems often require immense computational power, an investment which can be expensive and hard to access. Therefore companies are looking to the cloud, where providers are offering highly scalable on-demand computing power, virtual machines, over the internet. An example of this is the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), a service providing virtual machines, instead of direct access to physical computers. This enables a more efficient utilization of computer resources, resulting in affordable and effectively unlimited on-demand computing power. The downside with the cloud resources is heterogeneous and sub-optimal (due to sharing physical resources and virtualization overhead) performance. The findings show that the performance degradation of virtual machines differs depending on how much the resources are being shared with other users. 13-42% degradation for virtual machines are observed using a non-production grade system with the virtualization layer based on a non-optimized version of KVM hypervisor with resource overcommit. Running finite element method, FEM, simulations with COMSOL Multiphysics, a commercial FEM simulation software, on Amazon EC2 proved successful for large simulations, where the runtime for test problems is reduced using up to 16 virtual machines.