Comparison of Virtualization and Containerization Techniques for High-Performance Computing
Authors: Yuyu Zhou (University of Pittsburgh), Balaji Subramaniam (Argonne National Laboratory), Kate Keahey (Argonne National Laboratory), John Lange (University of Pittsburgh)
Abstract: High Performance Computing (HPC) users have traditionally used dedicated clusters hosted in national laboratories and universities to run their scientific applications. Recently, the use of cloud computing for such scientific applications has become popular, as exemplified by Amazon providing HPC instances. Nonetheless, HPC users have approached cloud computing cautiously due to performance overhead associated with virtualization and interference brought by virtual instances co-location. Recent improvements and developments in virtualization and containerization have alleviated some of these concerns regarding performance. However, the applicability of such technologies to HPC applications has not yet been thoroughly explored. Furthermore, scalability of scientific applications in the context of virtualized or containerized environments is not well studied. In this poster, we seek to understand the applicability of virtualization (exemplified by KVM) and containerization (exemplified by Docker) technologies to HPC applications.
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