Abstract

Over recent years we have seen a constant evolution of High-Performance Computing moving into commodity servers cluster types of systems. At the same time we have seen Cloud Computing being a proven, stable and reliable IT paradigm, utilising virtualized clusters of commodity servers as key components. This paper presents a face-to-face native-to-virtual HPC MPI application performance analysis on a range of general-use HPC applications by virtualizing InfiniBand via IPoIB at the guest virtual machine level on VMware ESXi as well as KVM hypervisor with production ready live migration support. Applications running on various small and medium HPC clusters are targeted to address users, considering full IT infrastructure virtualization by merging general purpose with HPC IT infrastructure. Live migration is a key component within a virtualized environment as it enables dynamic virtual IT infrastructure, therefore live migration performance impact is evaluated through a pluggable multi-platform architecture on a proactive fault-tolerance use case.

Highlights

  • The diversities of HPC applications range from shared-memory, distributed memory, PGAS (Partitioned Global Address Space) and other architecture-dependent and architecture-independent types of applications

  • General HPC virtualization studies, e.g. [7] cover general benefits and pitfalls related to High-Performance Cloud Computing outlining, many still open up questions such as scalability issues and performance variations depending on a particular application

  • This paper presented MPI application performance analysis within a virtualized environment using paravirtualized IPoIB InfiniBand network

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Summary

Introduction

This paper discusses the technological details behind IPoIB virtualization and presents performance analysis with results that should answer the question whether running MPI applications on a virtualized system with IPoIB virtualization yields an acceptable performance This would enable seamless transformation of HPC clusters into virtualized environments, merging general purpose with HPC IT infrastructure and would help users to decide whether cloud solutions, based on IPoIB virtualization would be appropriate for running MPI applications. This feature is used as the evaluation of live migration impact.

Related work
Motivation for HPC system virtualization
Methods of virtualizing InfiniBand
IPoIB for virtualization
Performance analysis
Testbed
Performance analysis results
Live migration impact and proactive fault-tolerance use-case
Live migration performance overhead
Findings
Conclusion
Full Text
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