Building Agile Workflow Microservice System for HPC Applications Based on Fast-start OSv

The advances of containers have significantly promoted the development of microservice architecture. This architecture splits a monolithic application into multiple independent components and the container orchestrator manages these components by the container in the cloud environment. The feasibility of deploying high performance computing(HPC) applications as microservices has been proven, but the existing container orchestrator incurs a large performance overhead as there is interference between different containers on the same physical host. In this paper, we design an agile workflow microservice system for HPC applications with fast-start OSv. We consider improving HPC workflow performance from two aspects: single OSv startup time optimization and workflow orchestration optimization. For single OSv startup time optimization, we design a fast-start OSv by analyzing the process of OSv startup and finding an optimization by modifying OSv source code. In this way, we get nearly 50% improvement of startup time. For workflow orchestration optimization, we propose four optimization techniques to speed up the execution of workflow by jointly considering OSv and workflow features, namely: node fusion, node merge, image preload, boot delay. Furthermore, we utilize our fast startup OSv to design an orchestration system for efficiently building an agile HPC workflow microservice by Kubevirt. Our experimental results optimization microservice system reduces the execution time by 30% compared with the original deployment with docker.