Performance Evaluation and Analysis for MPI-Based Data Movement in Virtual Switch Network

Abstract

Virtualization technologies have been widely deployed in data centers and private clusters to provide highly efficient and elastic resource provisioning. Further, virtualization has been extended to the network layer, known as network virtualization. For example, independent virtual switches have become the primary provider of network services for various virtual machines, such as VMware, Xen and Docker. This approach allows the physical network to be decoupled from the overlying virtual switch networks. However, network virutalization introduces performance degradation and scalability bottleneck to communication-intensive frameworks, such as MPI. We quantify and analyze the performance degradation involved with collective communications as well as bursty asynchronous transmission (BAT) in vswitch network environments. Our experiments illustrate that the performance of MPI communication can be degraded up to 5x in the virtual environment.