An analysis of hpc benchmarks in virtual machine environments

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?