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Pragmatics of Virtual Machines for High-Performance Computing: A Quantitative Study of Basic Overheads

Category: Data Management, Servers and Server OS

Overview Heterogeneous administrative domains, Operating Systems (OS), and libraries make it difficult for computational scientists to fully utilize metacomputers and grids. Through a simple quantitative study, this paper shows that recent improvements in software and hardware support reduces the overheads for HPC applications (e.g., GROMACS, BLAST, HMMer) to under 6% for compute-intensive jobs, but 9.7% or higher for more I/O-intensive jobs, on the x86-based platform. They also argue for qualitative and pragmatic benefits of using VMs for HPC, including ease of deployment, improved functionality, and the ability to run jobs on more systems than would normally be accessible. While not perfect, VMs are emerging as a pragmatic tool in HPC.

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Publisher: University of Alberta
File Format: PDF
Date Published: Nov 3, 2008
Format: White Papers
Topics: x86-standard Servers, High Performance Computing

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