What is Sabalcore HPC Cloud and what makes it unique?
Sabalcore provides High Performance Computing (HPC) systems in a private cloud for engineers, scientists, and researchers. Our systems are designed to run computationally intensive numerical applications with performance and efficiency in mind.
Fully Managed – Unlike Amazon, Azure, or Google where you must configure and manage your own environment, the environment at Sabalcore is fully managed and ready to go.
True “bare-metal” processing – We offer core-hours on bare-metal CPU cores. At Amazon, for example, time is typically sold on virtual CPUs, “vCPUs”. With vCPUs, the processor core is split into two virtual processors (via hyperthreading). One vCPU has less than half the processing power of one bare-metal core due to some processing overhead associated with virtualization and the fact that 2 vCPUs share the resources of single CPU core. To illustrate, 32 vCPUs from the other cloud providers has less computational capability than 16 bare-metal cores at Sabalcore. Contrary to popular belief, virtualization is not ideal for HPC workloads and is actually detrimental to performance in nearly all cases.
True high performance network – We only use non-virtual high performance network connectivity known as Infiniband. Infiniband is the most commonly used interconnect in supercomputers today and is an important technology for MPI based applications that run in parallel.
Tightly Coupled System – This is a very important aspect of high performance computing that is often overlooked. For data sensitive applications, it is important that the storage system is directly attached to the compute infrastructure. The data storage service is directly accessible to the compute infrastructure (nodes and clusters) at all times. This eliminates the need to stage data before it can be processed. Amazon, Azure, and Google require the user data to be copied from storage buckets to the virtual instances (such as a local drive on the instance) and the user is charge for the transfer bandwidth and storage.
Single Origin – It is important to know where and who is responsible for your HPC service. Unlike some HPC service providers, which are built upon commodity cloud platforms like Amazon AWS, Google Cloud, Sabalcore owns all servers and networks so you know exactly what you are paying for and where and who manages the service.
Native Client – Interfacing with the Sabalcore service is done through the Sabalcore Client or “ssClient” which you are using now. It runs independent of the browser (aside from the Knowledge Base) which provides a reliable, more efficient, user experience. Remote desktop, command line terminals, and file transfer tools work independently which helps streamline work-flows. Sabalcore’s ssClient is unique and no other provider offers a similar interface.
Fast file transfers – We have integrated a proprietary file transfer protocol to the ssClient called “Global File Transfer (GFT)”. This protocol greatly increases the file transfer speed and efficiency between Sabalcore and the user. It is designed to transfer GBs of data in minutes over large distances. This shortens the “time to results” by significantly reducing the time it takes to download your final results, especially for our users located overseas. No other providers offer this capability.