Performance evaluation of a xen-based virtual environment for high performance computing systems

Abstract

Virtualization is becoming an increasingly popular method to achieve software-based solution for sharing hardware infrastructure in a completely isolated manner. Xen virtual machine monitor (an open source software) is becoming a popular resource to implement virtualization for managing multiple operating systems instances within one physical computing node. Current research has focused on migrating these instances between nodes during runtime. This capability is useful for numerous activities, such as fault management, load balancing, and low-level system maintenance. In this paper, we evaluate the performance of Xen Virtual Machine Monitor for high performance computing (HPC) systems and discuss its suitability for 1) easy management of applications (e.g., automatic load balancing of MPI application processes), and 2) easy management of the HPC architecture (e.g., automatic migration of OS instances away from physical resources that have been predicted to fail in the near future). © 2007 Springer.