Interest in cloud computing within the HPC community continues to grow, but some barriers to wide-spread adoption remain due to aspects such as cost, support of low network latency applications, and data management. It has, however, tremendous potential to enhance HPC through its high scalability and elasticity. HPC workloads and hardware technologies are rapidly changing and becoming increasingly diversified. However, the configuration and capacity of on-premises resources, once deployed, are not easily changeable. In contrast, a hybrid infrastructure, with the ability of “burst-to-cloud”, can combine advantages from the on-premises and cloud resource spaces. The Research Computing Center (RCC) at The University of Chicago has developed such a solution, named Skyway, that incorporates multi-cloud computing resources as elastic extensions of its on-premises HPC infrastructure. An in-house system software is also developed to interface with the SLURM scheduler and cloud SDKs, that can burst HPC workloads to the cloud, providing users a seamless experience when interacting with both on-premises and cloud systems. Skyway currently can interface with Amazon AWS and Google GCP, and is being extended to other cloud providers (Microsoft Azure and Oracle), demonstrating the flexibility of using various cloud providers with the on-premises resources.
