A Fault-Tolerant Strategy for Virtualized HPC Clusters

Virtualization is a common strategy for improving the utilization of existing computing resources, particularly within data centers. However, its use for High Performance Computing (HPC) applications is currently limited despite its potential for both improving resource utilization as well as providing resource guarantees to its users. In this paper the authors systematically evaluate three major virtual machine implementations for computationally intensive HPC applications using various standard benchmarks. Using VMWare Server, Xen, and OpenVZ they examine the suitability of full virtualization (VMWare), paravirtualization (Xen), and operating system-level virtualization (OpenVZ) in terms of network utilization, SMP performance, file system performance, and MPI scalability.