Optimizing Cloud Computing Resource Usage for Hemodynamic Simulation

Cloud computing resources are becoming an increasingly attractive option for simulation workflows but require users to assess a wider variety of hardware options and associated costs than required by traditional in-house hardware or fixed allocations at leadership computing facilities. The pay-as-you-go model used by cloud providers gives users the opportunity to make more nuanced cost-benefit decisions at runtime by choosing hardware that best matches a given workload, but creates the risk of suboptimal allocation strategies or inadvertent cost overruns. In this work, we propose the use of an iteratively-refined performance model to optimize cloud simulation campaigns against overall cost, throughput, or maximum time to solution. Hemodynamic simulations represent an excellent use case for these assessments, as the relative costs and dominant terms in the performance model can vary widely with hardware, numerical parameters and physics models. Performance and scaling behavior of hemodynamic simulations on multiple cloud services as well as a traditional compute cluster are collected and evaluated, and an initial performance model is proposed along with a strategy for dynamically refining it with additional experimental data.