NOHAA: A NOvel Framework for HPC Analytics over Windows Azure

HPC analytics has become increasingly vital to analyze the large volumes of data produced by sophisticated computing instruments. Meanwhile, with the successful development of cloud computing, more and more scientists are devoted to deploy HPC analytics in the ever-popular clouds, which poses new challenges mainly caused by different storage architectures, resource management mechanisms and programming APIs. Firstly, there exists a ``data semantics" gap between the way data are stored by Cloud platform and the way data will be accessed by the HPC Analytics. Secondly, data are mostly distributed across data nodes for in-house data-intensive clusters to achieve co-located computation and storage, however, it is challenging for the public clouds to mimic because their data are stored centrally. In this paper, we develop a new HPC analytics framework called NOHAA, to provide 1) a semantics-aware intelligent data upload interface and 2) a locality-aware hierarchical storage system in support of co-located computation and storage on Windows Azure. Our extensive real world experiments show that NOHAA significantly reduces the average data access time by up to 85% and accelerates the HPC analytics execution time by a factor of 2 to 7.