High Performance Computing in the Cloud
Using cloud offerings for resource-intense High Performance Computing (HPC) seems like a self-evident step, as they offer on-demand access to virtually infinite resources. This should seem especially attractive for SMEs, who usually do not operate their own data centers, avoiding the high investment costs that go with them.
There are several reasons for the fact that HPC in the cloud is not used as widely as one would expect. These includ lack of trust and fear of competitors easily gaining access to confidential data and more technical reasons, such as performance degradation due to widespread use of virtualization or complicating existing workflows.
The project does research with the goal of offering HPC in a cloud infrastructure with special focus on making the infrastructure secure and privacy aware.