A low-overhead networking mechanism for virtualized high-performance computing systems

Abstract

The use of virtualized parallel and distributed computing systems is rapidly becoming the mainstream due to the significant benefit of high energy-efficiency and low management cost. Processing network operations in a virtual machine, however, incurs a lot of overhead from the arbitration of network devices between virtual machines, inherently by the nature of the virtualized architecture. Since data transfer between server nodes frequently occurs in parallel and distributed computing systems, the high overhead of networking may induce significant performance loss in the overall system. This paper introduces the design and implementation of a novel networking mechanism with low overhead for virtualized server nodes. By sacrificing isolation between virtual machines, which is insignificant in distributed or parallel computing systems, our approach significantly reduces the processing overhead in networking operations by up to 29% of processor load, along with up to 36% of processor cache miss. Furthermore, it improves network bandwidth by up to 8%, especially when transmitting large packets. As a result, our prototype enhances the performance of real-world workloads by up to 12% in our evaluation.