Performance evaluation of containers for HPC

Abstract

Container-based virtualization technologies such as LXC or Docker have gained a lot of interest recently, especially in the HPC context where they could help to address a number of long-running issues. Even if they have proven to perform better than full-fledged, hypervisorbased, virtualization solutions, there are still a lot of questions about the use of container solutions in the HPC context. This paper evaluates the performance of Linux-based container solutions that rely on cgroups and namespaces using the NAS parallel benchmarks, in various configurations. We show that containers technology has matured over the years, and that performance issues are being solved.