Evaluation of the HPC Challenge Benchmarks in Virtualized Environments

This paper evaluates the performance of the HPC Challenge benchmarks in several virtual environments, including VMware, KVM and VirtualBox. The HPC Challenge benchmarks consist of a suite of tests that examine the performance of HPC architectures using kernels with memory access patterns more challenging than those of the High Performance Linpack (HPL) benchmark used in the TOP500 list. The tests include four local (matrix-matrix multiply, STREAM, Random Access and FFT) and four global (High Performance Linpack - HPL, parallel matrix transpose - PTRANS, Random Access and FFT) kernel benchmarks. The purpose of the authors' experiments is to evaluate the overheads of the different virtual environments and investigate how different aspects of the system are affected by virtualization.