MyriXen: Message Passing in Xen Virtual Machines over Myrinet and Ethernet

Data access in HPC infrastructures is realized via user-level networking and OS-bypass techniques through which nodes can communicate with high bandwidth and low-latency. Virtualizing physical components requires hardware-aided software hypervisors to control I/O device access. As a result, line-rate bandwidth or lower latency message exchange over 10GbE interconnects hosted in Cloud Computing infrastructures can only be achieved by alleviating software overheads imposed irtualization abstraction layers, namely the VMM and the driver domains which hold direct access to I/O devices. In this paper, we present MyriXen, a framework in which Virtual Machines efficiently share network I/O devices bypassing overheads imposed by the VMM or the driver domains. MyriXen permits VMs to optimally exchange messages with the network via a high performance NIC, leaving security and isolation issues to the Virtualization layers. Smart Myri-10G NICs provide hardware abstractions that facilitate the inte...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: EUROPAR
• Authors: Anastassios Nanos, Nectarios Koziris
• Keywords: Cloud Computing Infrastructures, EUROPAR 2009, I/O Device Access, I/O Devices