What is POD?
POD is Penguin's On Demand HPC Cloud service. You don't need to own a powerful cluster in order to perform HPC tasks. Here we present some POD basics.
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Accessing POD POD users connect to a personal login node on POD by remote access (internet or VPN) at an IP address provided by Penguin. This connection is verified against the IP address (or range of addresses) of the user for security. All user access is accomplished either through SSH (standard Linux shell provided by Penguin) or through a user-supplied web-based user interface. The POD environment can host web servers so a user can provide a customer facing portal that is directly connected to their login node and to the HPC resources. |
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Using POD The login node is configured with either RedHat or CentOS Linux, CentOS Linux modules and other tools. Penguin’s Scyld ClusterWare cluster management software enables POD to rapidly provision a set of compute nodes for customers based on their demand. Either TORQUE Resource Manager or Sun Grid Engine is used to schedule jobs. Penguin’s POD support team is always available to assist in configuring your computing environment on your login node. This environment will be persistent on POD for as long as you maintain a POD account. |
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Getting data on POD Files are transferred to POD either directly over the internet or via a “disk caddy” service that allows the transfer of 2TB files per disk overnight. Each user has 50Mb of bandwidth available. If using the “disk caddy” service, the disks are provided as part of our POD service and are actually owned by the customer. They are returned to the customer once the data has been transferred to POD storage. |
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Submitting Jobs Submitted jobs go into a queue and move through the queue as determined by POD’s job scheduler using a “Fair Share” policy. A query can be submitted to POD to see the status of your jobs in the queue. |
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Storing Data on POD Persistent storage is provided for storing your local data. POD provides both on-demand storage where you pay only for what you use and the option for longer-term, personal storage. The on-demand storage is attached to the compute cluster via several 10GigE network links to provide high I/O capabilities. Each compute node has a 2TB scratch disk for local storage of data during compute. A parallel file storage system is also available for applications with many clients that need simultaneous access to a common data set. |
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Support POD users receive technical support from Penguin’s HPC experts, including application set-up, creation of the HPC computing environment, ongoing support, data exchange services, and application tuning. |