Provision of Docker and InfiniBand in High Performance Computing

Abstract

High Performance Computing (HPC) is playing an important role in a variety of domains with the demand of high-level computational capacity. Besides, HPC provides services for a huge range of different users as well as multiple environments. Hence, the performance of the network is also one of the important criteria. The advent of InfiniBand (IB) aims at the improvement of computer-networking. IB technology has been used and expanded on virtualization environments, especially in virtual machines (VMs). Recently, another virtualization technique known as Docker platform is being popularly considered. Docker promises to bring higher performance, but it also poses some challenging problems. Concretely, while VMs are combined with IB by standard virtualization modules such as SR-IOV, Docker containers are still being examined on feasible solutions with IB. An important question is the advantages and disadvantages of both architectures, namely VM and Docker. In this paper, we deploy Docker on IB infrastructure and evaluate their performance with VMs. Remarkably, we highlight the benefits and the drawbacks of Docker in the conflict of resources when its architecture shares the same kernel with the host. Our evaluations emphasize the potential of Docker containers in HPC field, simultaneously, we propose experiences when using Docker for running parallel applications.