Cloud vendors performance comparison

Date: 2016/09

Exabyte.io utilizes multiple cloud vendors resources to provide users with a large scale computing infrastructure. Since Each cloud provider uses a specific type of resources, applications performance vary on different cloud vendors. For the sake of simplicity, a short VASP calculation utilizing 1 CPU with the following characteristics was used to compare the performance of four cloud providers, AWS, Rackspace, SoftLayer and Microsoft Azure.

Model and Method

Plane-wave Pseudopotential Density Functional Theory formalism as implemented in Vienna Ab-initio Simulation Package (VASP) at version 5.3.5 with a corresponding set of atomic pseudo-potentials was employed in this run.

Inputs

**INCAR**

SYSTEM = Si
!!
NWRITE = 2
IALGO = 48
NELM = 13
ENMAX = 140 eV
IALGO = -1
NELMIN = 3
NELMDL = 7
NSIM = 4
LREAL = .TRUE.
BMIX = 2.5
ISYM = 0
EDIFF = 1E-4
LWAVE = .FALSE.
LCHARG = .FALSE.
!!
NSW = 0
POTIM = 5.00
TEBEG = 423
!!
ISMEAR = 1
SIGMA = 0.1
EMIN = -15
EMAX = 0

**POSCAR**

Silicon8
1.0
5.468728 0.000000 0.000000
0.000000 5.468728 0.000000
0.000000 0.000000 5.468728
Si
8
direct
0.250000 0.250000 0.250000 Si
0.750000 0.750000 0.250000 Si
0.500000 0.500000 0.000000 Si
0.000000 0.500000 0.500000 Si
0.250000 0.750000 0.750000 Si
0.000000 0.000000 0.000000 Si
0.750000 0.250000 0.750000 Si
0.500000 0.000000 0.500000 Si

**KPOINTS**

Automatic mesh
0
Gamma
  8  8  8
  0.  0.  0.

Results

Provider	CPU	Memory (GB)	Disk (GB)	Bandwidth (Gbps)	Runtime (sec)
AWS	36 core, Intel Xeon E5-2666-v3, 2.90GHz	60	10	10	37.8
Azure	16 core, Intel Xeon E5-2673-v3, 2.40GHz	32	256	10	43.5
Rackspace	32 core, Intel Xeon E5-2680-v2, 2.80GHz	60	50	5	49
Softlayer	32 core, Intel Xeon E5-2650-v0, 2.00GHz	64	25	1	89.5

NOTE: no Infiband hardware was available on Azure at the time