HPC supported mission-critical cloud architecture

Abstract

Tactical Operations Center (TOC) system in military field is an advanced computer system composed of multiple servers and desktops to interlock internal/external weapon systems processing mission-critical applications in combat situation. However, the current TOC system has several limitations such as difficulty of integrating tactical weapon systems including missile launch system and radar system into the single TOC system due to the heterogeneity of HW and SW between systems, and an inefficient computing resource management for the weapon systems. In this paper, we proposed a novel HPC supported mission-critical Cloud architecture as TOC for Surface-to-Air-Missile (SAM) system with OpenStack Cloud OS, Data Distribution Service (DDS), and GPU virtualization techniques. With this approach, our system provides elastic resource management over the weapon systems with virtual machines, integration of heterogeneous systems with different kinds of guest OS, real-time, reliable, and high-speed communication between the virtual machines and virtualized GPU resource over the virtual machines. Evaluation of our TOC system includes DDS performance measurement over 10Gbps Ethernet and QDR InfiniBand networks on the virtualized environment with OpenStack Cloud OS, and GPU virtual-ization performance evaluation with two different methods, PCI pass-through and remote-API. With the evaluation results, we conclude that our system provides reasonable performance in the combat situation compared to the previous TOC system while additionally supports scalable and elastic use of computing resource through the virtual machines.