Cloud Computing II

• Post by: mehul
• September 29, 2021
• No Comment

In the previous post we have seen What is Cloud Computing and What are it’s various types. But, you must be wondering why someone working in Computational Mechanics field needs to know about that. The answer is, we as a researcher and working professionals use various software packages to design, analyze and visualize and for those packages we require a system that can handle such a huge processing at times. The personal systems that we use may fail to accomplish such huge task which require great hardware configuration and buying huge systems may not feasible option. So, what we can do is to use the services offered by these cloud service providers, it can be done –

• either accessing the software packages directly via internet where the application will run in their servers and you can simply access them through your browser. (i.e. Software as a Service SaaS)

• or use cloud servers and access the computing resources , these servers can have 1000s of CPUS and one can simply select and use a portion of that as per the requirements. (i.e. Infrastructure as a Service IaaS)

Accessing former one is very easy, simply go to the website of the software provider and register in their cloud access (if they provide). The procedure to access the later one is also not very difficult and has been described in this post.

Procedure to access clouds for computing (IaaS)

Step 1 – Create account in cloud platform-

Simply choose the cloud service providers Google cloud, Amazon Web Service, Microsoft Azure, IBM Cloud, Oracle etc. and register in their platform. Most of these service providers give free access for certain period, like Google clouds offer $ 300 credit for 90 days for new users.

Step – 2 – Configure the system requirement

Select the configure you want for your virtual system, like memory size, number of core in CPU, operating system and storage etc. You can modify the configuration as per the need.

Step 3 – Open the Terminal and

Once the system is configured and started, the main task is to access that system. And that is done through the Terminal or command prompt, the Graphic User Interface (GUI) is not supported in cloud systems. One can run any application or software packages that doesn’t require the GUI to access them.

Cheers !! You got a system without spending a single penny.

Now, the major point is that how much will it cost, a typical 48 core 128 GB system can cost somewhere around ₹ 5 lakhs, whereas a cloud system with same configuration can give you 4400+ hours runtime in the same cost and at the same time also frees you from the maintenance cost and work. Here is an estimate of the cloud computing resources –

Item	On demand price
Custom vCPUs	$0.02890 / vCPU hour
Custom Memory	$0.003067 / GB hour
Custom Storage	$ 17.48 / 100 GB year

Some major point that one should always consider –

• Always shutdown the system when not in use and before closing the window in browser, else your cloud system will still be running and you will charged as per that.
• Configure the system as per the requirement, if the complexity of the problem and computation resource requirement is not huge, then prefer minimal configuration. It will save your money.