With the current trends towards utilising cloud computing, it becomes interesting to explore the utility of cloud computing in the area of high- performance computing. Such area significantly differs from other typical cloud applications in its intensive computation and communication demands. This contradicts with the underlying sharing concept of resources, exploited by cloud computing. In this paper, we present work-in-progress for evaluating the performance of the standard HPC SPECMPI benchmark on a private, dedicated, cloud system. We compare the virtualised performance with native execution, using the same underlying physical machines. Generally, the cloud environment relies on virtualisation to allow for consolidation of resources. This adds an overhead for emulating I/O operations, as well as increasing the sharing overheads on the processors. We construct a simple, yet efficient, analytical model that accounts for the virtualisation overheads, taking into consideration the application communication and computation patterns, and the underlying physical computing and communication infrastructure. The developed model is a queueing network model that accounts for the contention on physical processing cores and the communication interconnect, and predicts performance. This model has the advantage of defining a basic model providing an upper bound on performance of the SPECMPI on the cloud. Future work will consider modelling other co-existing cloud applications.