HPC CloudPills: On-demand deployment and execution of HPC application in cloud environments

High Performance Computing (HPC) is a valuable instrument in many areas of scientific research and industrial production. However, due to the high investment costs for its implementation, its diffusion is often restricted to large research centres or medium to large size industrial companies. The project HPC Cloud Pills aimed at exploring how the technologies of Cloud Computing can help to reduce the cost and complexity associated with creating, maintaining and managing IT infrastructure for high performance computing. The objective is to make the high performance computing accessible to reality today not capable of supporting the high initial costs and management that it involves. In this paper the general architecture of HPC Cloud Pills will be described and some tests performed on the system with SPRAY (an HPC application)