Presentation courtesy of David Bindel.
Abstract:
You have a week until the deadline, and simulations that would take two weeks to run on your laptop. Or you have a problem you want to solve, if you only had enough memory on your desktop. Where should you run your computation? Should you apply for time on a supercomputer, look for a local cluster, or dive into the buzzword-laden world of VMs, Docker, and XaaS? This week, we give a panoramic overview of servers, clusters, clouds, and supercomputers, discussing some performance realities and myths associated with each. We also discuss the problem of how to set up a consistent environment across many platforms, and describe the concept of virtualization: of environments, languages, hardware, and operating systems.