Performance comparison of two virtual machine scenarios using an HPC application: A case study using molecular dynamics simulations

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

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

5 Scopus citations

Abstract

Obtaining high flexibility to performance-loss ratio is a key challenge of today's HPC virtual environment landscape. And while extensive research has been targeted at extracting more performance from virtual machines, the idea that whether novel virtual machine usage scenarios could lead to high flexibility Vs performance trade-off has received less attention. We, in this paper, take a step forward by studying and comparing the performance implications of running the Large-scale Atomic/Molecular Massively Parallel Simulator (LAMMPS) application on two virtual machine configurations. First configuration consists of two virtual machines per node with 1 application process per virtual machine. The second configuration consists of 1 virtual machine per node with 2 processes per virtual machine. Xen has been used as an hypervisor and standard Linux as a guest virtual machine. Our results show that the difference in overall performance impact on LAMMPS between the two virtual machine configurations described above is around 3%. We also study the difference in performance impact in terms of each configuration's individual metrics such as CPU, I/O, Memory, and interrupt/context switches.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings of the 3rd ACM Workshop on System-level Virtualization for High Performance Computing, HPCVirt'09
Pages33-40
Number of pages8
DOIs
StatePublished - 2009
Event3rd ACM Workshop on System-level Virtualization for High Performance Computing, HPCVirt'09 - Nuremberg, Germany
Duration: Mar 31 2009Mar 31 2009

Publication series

NameProceedings of the 3rd ACM Workshop on System-level Virtualization for High Performance Computing, HPCVirt'09

Conference

Conference3rd ACM Workshop on System-level Virtualization for High Performance Computing, HPCVirt'09
Country/TerritoryGermany
CityNuremberg
Period03/31/0903/31/09

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