Virtual Machine Resource Management for High Performance Computing Applications

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a scheme that manages the computational resource of virtual machines that are used to host high performance computing applications. Different from the static configuration methodology employed by the state-of-art virtual machine monitors, in our scheme, the virtual machines are automatically configured according to the actual load generated by the applications. NPB, HPL and kernel compilation are chosen as representative high performance computing applications to run inside the virtual machine constructed using our scheme, and the performance of such applications are compared with that obtained from the statically configured virtual machines. The comparison indicates that besides the great flexibility it brings, the performance penalty resulted by our scheme is below 5% in most cases, and the performance of the application running inside the automatically configured virtual machine is even better than that running inside the statically configured ones in some cases.