SR-IOV: Performance Benefits for Virtualized Interconnects

The demand for virtualization within high-performance computing is rapidly growing as new communities, driven by both new application stacks and new computing modalities, continue to grow and expand. While virtualization has traditionally come with significant penalties in I/O performance that have precluded its use in mainstream large-scale computing environments, new standards such as Single Root I/O Virtualization (SR-IOV) are emerging that promise to diminish the performance gap and make high-performance virtualization possible. To this end, we have evaluated SR-IOV in the context of both virtualized InfiniBand and virtualized 10 gigabit Ethernet (GbE) using micro-benchmarks and real-world applications. We compare the performance of these interconnects on non-virtualized environments, Amazon's SR-IOV-enabled C3 instances, and our own SR-IOV-enabled InfiniBand cluster and show that SR-IOV significantly reduces the performance losses caused by virtualization. InfiniBand demonstrates less than 2% loss of bandwidth and less than 10% increase in latency when virtualized with SR-IOV. Ethernet also benefits, although less dramatically, when SR-IOV is enabled on Amazon's cloud.