Abstract

Virtualization is a common strategy for improving the utilization of existing computing resources, particularly within data centers. However, its use for high performance computing (HPC) applications is currently limited despite its potential for both improving resource utilization as well as providing resource guarantees to its users. This paper systematically evaluates various VMs for computationally intensive HPC applications using various standard benchmarks. Using VMWare Server, xen, and OpenVZ we examine the suitability of full virtualization, paravirtualization, and operating system-level virtualization in terms of network utilization SMP performance, file system performance, and MPI scalability. We show that the operating system-level virtualization provided by OpenVZ provides the best overall performance, particularly for MPI scalability.

Date

March 25, 2008

Authors

John Paul Walters, Vipin Chaudhary, Minsuk Cha, Salvatore Guercio, Steve Gallo

Conference

22nd International Conference on Advanced Information Networking and Applications (aina 2008)

Pages

861-868

Publisher

IEEE