HPC management and engineering in the hybrid cloud

The evolution and maturation of Cloud Computing created an opportunity for the emergence of new Cloud applications. High-performance Computing, a complex problem solving class, arises as a new business consumer by taking advantage of the Cloud premises and leaving the expensive datacenter management and difficult grid development. Standing on an advanced maturing phase, today’s Cloud discarded many of its drawbacks, becoming more and more efficient and widespread. Performance enhancements, prices drops due to massification and customizable services on demand triggered an emphasized attention from other markets. HPC, regardless of being a very well established field, traditionally has a narrow frontier concerning its deployment and runs on dedicated datacenters or large grid computing. The problem with common placement is mainly the initial cost and the inability to fully use resources which not all research labs can afford. The main objective of this work was to investigate new technical solutions to allow the deployment of HPC applications on the Cloud, with particular emphasis on the private on-premise resources – the lower end of the chain which reduces costs. The work includes many experiments and analysis to identify obstacles and technology limitations. The feasibility of the objective was tested with new modeling, architecture and several applications migration. The final application integrates a simplified incorporation of both public and private Cloud resources, as well as HPC applications scheduling, deployment and management. It uses a well-defined user role strategy, based on federated authentication and a seamless procedure to daily usage with balanced low cost and performance.

The suppliers selection problem: a case study

The effective supplier evaluation and purchasing processes are of vital importance to business organizations, making the suppliers selection problem a fundamental key issue to their success. We consider a complex supplier selection problem with multiple products where minimum package quantities, minimum order values related to delivery costs, and discounted pricing schemes are taken into account. Our main contribution is to present a mixed integer linear programming (MILP) model for this supplier selection problem. The model is used to solve several examples including three real case studies from an electronic equipment assembly company.