An analysis of hpc benchmarks in virtual machine environments

Anand Tikotekar, Geoffroy Vallée, Thomas Naughton, Hong Ong, Christian Engelmann, Stephen L. Scott

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

11 Scopus citations

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 for HPC benchmark applications. Based on the investigation of the overhead profiles for different benchmarks, we aim to address questions such as: Are the overhead profiles for a particular type of benchmarks (such as compute-bound) similar or are there grounds to conclude otherwise?

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationEuro-Par 2008 Workshops - Parallel Processing - VHPC 2008, UNICORE 2008, HPPC 2008, SGS 2008, PROPER 2008, ROIA 2008, and DPA 2008, Revised Selected Papers
Pages63-71
Number of pages9
DOIs
StatePublished - 2009
EventWorkshops on Parallel Processing, Euro-Par 2008: VHPC 2008, UNICORE 2008, HPPC 2008, SGS 2008, PROPER 2008, ROIA 2008, and DPA 2008 - Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain
Duration: Aug 25 2008Aug 26 2008

Publication series

NameLecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
Volume5415 LNCS
ISSN (Print)0302-9743
ISSN (Electronic)1611-3349

Conference

ConferenceWorkshops on Parallel Processing, Euro-Par 2008: VHPC 2008, UNICORE 2008, HPPC 2008, SGS 2008, PROPER 2008, ROIA 2008, and DPA 2008
Country/TerritorySpain
CityLas Palmas de Gran Canaria
Period08/25/0808/26/08

Funding

ORNL’s work was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, under Contract DE-AC05-00OR22725.

FundersFunder number
U.S. Department of EnergyDE-AC05-00OR22725

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