An Analysis of HPC Benchmarks in Virtual Machine Environments

Abstract. Virtualization technology has been gaining acceptance in the scientific community due to its overall flexibility in running HPC applications. It has been reported that a specific class of applications is better suited to a particular type of virtualization scheme or implementation. For example, Xen has been shown to perform with little overhead for compute-bound applications. Such a study, although useful, does not allow us to generalize conclusions beyond the performance analysis of that application which is explicitly executed. An explanation of why the generalization described above is difficult, may be due to the versatility in applications, which leads to different overheads in virtual environments. For example, two similar applications may spend disproportionate amount of time in their respective library code when run in virtual environments. In this paper we aim to study such potential causes by investigating the behavior and identifying patterns of various overheads f...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: EUROPAR
• Authors: Anand Tikotekar, Geoffroy Vallée, Thomas Naughton, Hong Ong, Christian Engelmann, Stephen L. Scott
• Keywords: Distributed And Parallel Computing, EUROPAR 2008, Overhead Profiles, Particular Type, Virtual Environments