Xen-Based HPC: A Parallel I/O Perspective

Virtualization using Xen-based virtual machine environment has yet to permeate the field of high performance computing (HPC). One major requirement for HPC is the availability of scalable and high performance I/O. Conventional wisdom suggests that virtualization of system services must lead to degraded performance. In this presentation, we take on a parallel I/O perspective to study the viability of Xen-based HPC for data-intensive programs. We have analyzed the overheads and migration costs for parallel I/O programs in a Xen-based virtual machine cluster. Our analysis covers PVFS-based parallel I/O over two different networking protocols: TCP-based Gigabit Ethernet and VMM-bypass InfiniBand. Our experimental results suggest that network processing in Xen-based virtualization can significantly impact the performance of Parallel I/O. By carefully tuning the networking layers, we have demonstrated the following for Xen-based HPC I/O: (1) TCP offloading can help achieve low overhead para...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: CCGRID
• Authors: Weikuan Yu, Jeffrey S. Vetter
• Keywords: CCGRID 2008, Cluster Computing, Parallel I/o, Parallel I/o Perspective, Xen-based HPC