Cloud Services on a Frontier Grid
With Frontier 5, you get all the benefits of cloud computing: scalable, on-demand virtualization, in addition to the industry-leading features of Parabon's Frontier Grid Platform: security, reliability, and ease-of-use. Frontier 5 allows you to host cloud services and launch grid jobs simultaneously across your existing enterprise infrastructure.
Frontier's Integrated VM Management turns the grid server into a dynamic cloud computing platform by enabling it to programmatically provision entire operating system (OS) images across the grid:
- Deploy fully-functioning cloud services en masse across ordinary Windows, Linux or Mac workstations - You can encapsulate entire OS environments, including third-party libraries and application dependencies.
- A Common Platform for Cloud Services and Grid Jobs - You can run massively-parallel modeling & simulation applications, for example, alongside dynamically scalable cloud services — all on your existing enterprise hardware. These services run simultaneously but independently from one another, without effecting normal enterprise operations.
- Elasticity via Programmatic Provisioning - Your new system can automatically scale itself up and down based on demand, without requiring human interaction. Customized operating system images, no matter what the OS, can be automatically deployed and instantiated to satisfy processing demands. Tasks that require peak performance at certain times — e.g., financial applications that run at the end of the month — can automatically scale up to handle the increased workload, and scale back down when that capacity is no longer required, programmaticly!
- Migration and Fail-Over
- Load Balancing - Frontier allows virtual services to be migrated off of heavily-loaded hosts and onto less-taxed machines automatically and transparently.
- High Availability - By distributing the operation of on-demand services across a greater number of underlying components, Frontier helps eliminate the Single Point of Failure from mission-critical applications. Even if a given physical server suddenly drops out, Frontier's fault-tolerant architecture allows other virtual servers to take over that system's load seamlessly and securely.
- Consolidation - Running multiple VMs on fewer physical servers means lowered IT infrastructure costs, simplified maintenance, and lower power/space/cooling overhead. By providing shared access to existing enterprise resources, organizations can dramatically reduce their hardware budget for dedicated computing assets.
Launching Grid Jobs on Cloud
With Frontier installed within your virtualized cloud infrastructure, you get:
- Extreme-Scale Computation via
Massively Parallel Processing -
Grid computing solutions enable
parallel processing of computational tasks, often using idle vs.
dedicated capacity.
- Accelerates throughput from decades to days or months to minutes.
- Enables deep computations that are otherwise intractable.
- Characteristics of a grid job: large numbers of work requests that run for short periods of time.
- Server Consolidation - The availability of low-cost servers over the past decade has fostered a pervasive tendency among organizations to purchase computing capacity far in excess of actual demand. Studies show that aggregate server daytime utilization varies between 5-20%. Some experts believe aggregate utilization rates fail to exceed 5% when desktops are included. Frontier allows you to maximally use your existing IT assets and reduce the number of servers in your data center or enterprise.
- Overcome Power, Space & Cooling Problems - The Frontier Enterprise Grid Platform is a great tool for addressing the power, space and cooling issues that accompany unchecked "server proliferation." By harnessing the excess capacity of existing infrastructure, Frontier can make available the 80-95% of an organization's unused computational capacity - without impacting normal operations! When HPC demand is satisfied in this way, fewer new hardware resources need to be procured and maintained, which greatly aids server consolidation efforts.
- Easily Deploy and Manage Virtualized
Environments
- The Frontier Grid Platform is available as a set
of Virtual Appliances (VA), allowing easy deployment and management in
virtualized environments. The Frontier Compute Engine VA can be
configured to run at set times, use only a portion of available
computational power, and give priority to other processes and VMs. A
single Frontier Server VA can manage a grid of thousands of nodes and
because it is horizontally scalable, additional Frontier Server VAs can
be deployed side-by-side to dynamically accommodate grids of tens of
thousands of nodes. Without affecting other applications in the data
center, excess capacity is turned into supercomputing capacity.
References:
Report to Congress on Server and Data Center Energy Efficiency, Public Law 109-431, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, ENERGY STAR Program.
