Fe2vCl2: From Bare Metal to High Performance Computing on Virtual Clusters and Cloud Infrastructure

Container based virtualization techniques are playing a more and more important role in cloud and service oriented computing. Technologies, such as Docker, enable the development and deployment of new and especially light weight applications and allow for a more cloud provider independent operation. Even though cloud infrastructure and containers offer many advantages, both technologies have yet to be widely utilized in the field of High Performance Computing. In this paper we present Fe2vCl2, a framework for enabling HPC applications on common cloud infrastructure. Using Docker to integrate it into cloud environments, our framework allows the on-demand deployment of virtual clusters for the parallel execution of HPC applications. We describe our overall application architecture along with the advantages of both technologies, especially with regard to HPC applications. In order to verify our implementation we evaluate it using different HPC applications and benchmarks.