Modest Scale HPC on Azure Using CGYRO

Authors: Igor Sfiligoi (San Diego Supercomputer Center) and Jeff Candy (General Atomics)

Abstract: Fusion simulations have traditionally required the use of leadership-scale HPC resources in order to produce advances in physics. One such package is CGYRO, a premier tool for multi-scale plasma turbulence simulation. CGYRO is a typical HPC application that will not fit into a single node, as it requires several terabytes of memory and O(100) TFLOPS compute capability for cutting-edge simulations. CGYRO also requires high-throughput and low-latency networking, due to its reliance on global FFT computations. We explored the feasibility of running CGYRO on cloud resources provided by Microsoft on their Azure platform, using the Infiniband-connected HPC resources in spot mode. We observed both that CPU-only resources were very efficient, and that running in spot mode was doable, with minimal side effects. The GPU-enabled resources were less cost-effective but allowed for higher scaling.

Best Poster Finalist (BP): no

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