Deploying and optimizing performance of a 3D hydrodynamic model on cloud

This papers presents details on deploying the Environmental Fluid Dynamics Code (EFDC) on a container-based cloud environment. Results are compared to a bare metal deployment. Application-specific benchmarking tests are complemented by detailed network tests that evaluate isolated MPI communication protocols both at intra-node and inter-node level with varying degrees of self-contention. Cloud-based simulations report significant performance loss in mean run-times. A containerised environment increases simulation time by up to 50%. More detailed analysis demonstrates that much of this performance penalty is a result of large variance in MPI communciation times. This manifests as simulation runtime variance on container cloud that hinders both simulation run-time and collection of well-defined quality-of-service metrics.