VNET/P: Bridging the Cloud and High Performance Computing Through Fast Overlay Networking

Overlay networking with a layer 2 abstraction provides a powerful model for virtualized wide-area distributed computing resources, including for High Performance Computing (HPC) on collections of Virtual Machines (VMs). With the emergence of cloud computing, it is now possible to allow VMs hosting tightly-coupled HPC applications to seamlessly migrate between distributed cloud resources and tightly-coupled supercomputing and cluster resources. However, to achieve the application performance that the tightly-coupled resources are capable of, it is important that the overlay network not introduce significant overhead relative to the native hardware. To support such a model, the authors describe the design, implementation, and evaluation of a virtual networking system that has negligible latency and bandwidth overheads in 1-10 Gbps networks.