Evaluating hardware-assisted virtualization for deploying HPC-as-a-service

Virtualization has been the main driver behind the rise of Cloud computing. Despite Cloud computing's tremendous benefits to many applications (e.g., enterprise, Web, game/ multimedia, life sciences, and data analytics), its success in High Performance Computing (HPC) domain has been limited. The oft-cited reason is, apparently, latency caused by virtualization. Meanwhile, the rising popularity of virtualization has compelled CPU vendors to incorporate virtualization technology (VT) in chips. This hardware VT is believed to accelerate context switching, speed up memory address translation, and enable I/O direct access; those are basically sources of virtualization overheads. This paper reports the evaluation on computation and communication performance of different virtualized environments, i.e., Xen and KVM, leveraging hardware VT. Different network fabrics, namely Gigabit Ethernet and InfiniBand, were employed and tested in the virtualized environments and their results were compared against those in the native environments. A real-world HPC application (an MPI-based hydrodynamic simulation) was also used to assess the performance. Outcomes indicate that hardware-assisted virtualization can bring HPC-as-a-Service into realization.