Performance evaluation of ROMS v3.6 on a commercial cloud system

Abstract. Many commercial cloud computing companies provide technologies such as high-performance instances, enhanced networking and remote direct memory access to aid in High Performance Computing (HPC). These new features enable us to explore the feasibility of ocean modelling in commercial cloud computing. Many scientists and engineers expect that cloud computing will become mainstream in the near future. Thus, evaluation of the exact performance and features of commercial cloud services for numerical modelling is appropriate. In this study, the performance of the Regional Ocean Modelling System (ROMS) and the High Performance Linpack (HPL) benchmarking software package was evaluated on Amazon Web Services (AWS) for various configurations. Through comparison of actual performance data and configuration settings obtained from AWS and laboratory HPC, we conclude that cloud computing is a powerful Information Technology (IT) infrastructure for running and operating numerical ocean modelling with minimal effort. Thus, cloud computing can be a useful tool for ocean scientists that have no available computing resource.