An Empirical Study of SDN-accelerated HPC Infrastructure for Scientific Research

Abstract

High performance computing is required for Big Science application because the proliferation and huge amount of scientific data that needs to be analyzed is a serious problem. Traditionally, network resources were generally assumed as a static resource users cannot control on demand. By integrating network programmability to every stage of a scientific workflow, this study explores a next-generation high performance computing infrastructure where both computational and network resources are flexibly sliced and efficiently leveraged based on the resource requirements of the scientific applications. Technically, Software Defined Networking has been adopted as a key technology for this purpose. In this paper the concept and goals of a next-generation high performance computing infrastructure is introduced and the current status of our research is discussed.