Compute Services

Working with compute

Most scientific work researchers do includes computation. Could be the need to run a small analysis. Or a data reduction job that has to be repeated a million times on every measurement coming in from an ionosphere observation facility. Or a handful of cutting-edge simulations of climate models that each demand a huge number of compute cores.

EGI provides a variety of compute services for each of these use cases. Researchers can choose the best compute tool for each application, from customisable and elastic Virtual Machine (VM) based cloud to fully managed distributed platforms that will run their jobs using CPUs, GPUs or both.

The compute services are summarized below:

• Cloud Compute means VM-based computing with associated storage. It delivers customisable resources where users have complete control over the software, the supporting compute type and capacity. Typical use-cases are user gateways or portals, interactive computing platforms and almost any kind of data- and/or compute-intensive workloads.
• Container Compute supports running container-based applications with either Docker or Kubernetes on top of Cloud Compute. Typical use-cases are multi-tenant, microservices-based applications that must easily scale horizontally.
• High Throughput Compute provides access to large, shared grid computing systems for running computational jobs at scale. Typical use-cases include analysis of large datasets in an “embarrassingly parallel” fashion (i.e. by splitting the data into small pieces), and executing thousands, or even more independent computing tasks simultaneously, each processing one piece of data.

When researchers encounter the need for large amounts of computing power, need hybrid solutions based on the above mentioned services, or simply do not care to manage the underlying compute facilities that will run their workloads, cloud orchestrators can help provision, manage, and monitor compute resources, which then run scientific workloads.

The following sections describe each compute service that is available in the EGI infrastructure.