InfiniBand virtualization on KVM

Abstract

With the ability to provide on-demand service and to reduce the IT cost, cloud computing becomes more and more popular recently. Virtualization is one of the important technologies in cloud computing, whose main idea is to provide abstractions of the physical resources. However, such abstraction can cause performance degradation, especially for I/O virtualization, which is usually the performance bottleneck in cloud computing. InfiniBand is a network system that provides very low latency (less than 5us) and very high bandwidth (multiple Gbps). Due to its excellent performance, InfiniBand is commonly used in high performance computing (HPC) area. In this paper, we propose Virt-IB for InfiniBand virtualization on Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM). The main components of Virt-IB are VM IB library and Virt-IB driver. Our design processes InfiniBand APIs directly in guest VM and communicates with InfiniBand device indirectly to perform the real operations. VM IB library provides API interface and user-level InfiniBand driver. Virt-IB driver provides a channel for VM IB library to write commands into InfiniBand device indirectly. Evaluation results show that our current work is better than network virtualization and it can achieve about 50% performance of native InfiniBand. © 2012 IEEE.