Exploring the support for high performance applications in the container runtime environment

Abstract

Cloud computing is the driving power behind the current technological era. Virtualization is rightly referred to as the backbone of cloud computing. Impacts of virtualization employed in high performance computing (HPC) has been much reviewed by researchers. The overhead in the virtualization layer was one of the reasons which hindered its application in the HPC environment. Recent developments in virtualization, especially the OS container based virtualization provides a solution that employs a lightweight virtualization layer and promises lesser overhead. Containers are advantageous over virtual machines in terms of performance overhead which is a major concern in the case of both data intensive applications and compute intensive applications. Currently, several industries have adopted container technologies such as Docker. While Docker is widely used, it has certain pitfalls such as security issues. The recently introduced CoreOS Rkt container technology overcomes these shortcomings of Docker. There has not been much research on how the Rkt environment is suited for high performance applications. The differences in the stack of the Rkt containers suggest better support for high performance applications. High performance applications consist of CPU-intensive and data-intensive applications. The High Performance Linpack Library and the Graph500 are the commonly used computation intensive and data-intensive benchmark applications respectively. In this work, we explore the feasibility of this inter-operable Rkt container in high performance applications by running the HPL and Graph500 applications and compare its performance with the commonly used container technologies such as LXC and Docker containers.