Improving performance by embedding HPC applications in lightweight Xen domains

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Improving performance by embedding HPC applications in lightweight Xen domains

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European Conference on Computer Systems archive
Proceedings of the 2nd workshop on System-level virtualization for high performance computing table of contents

Glasgow, Scotland

Pages 9-15

Year of Publication: 2008

ISBN:978-1-60558-120-0

Authors

Samuel Thibault	XenSource, Cambridge
Tim Deegan	XenSource, Cambridge

Publisher

ACM New York, NY, USA

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Downloads (6 Weeks): 14, Downloads (12 Months): 139, Citation Count: 1

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ABSTRACT

Although they allow easy and cost-effective use of a wide range of machines, the programming interface and behavior of general-purpose Operating Systems (OS) often fail to meet, or even conflict with, the specific desires of High-Performance Computing (HPC) applications, such as low preemption or control over memory and I/O management. That often leads to poor performance. On the other hand, hypervisors are more and more commonly used on top of those OSes for various reasons, such as ease of dedicated environment deployment or load balancing. In contrast to the usual unix process model, hypervisors provide their guests with kernel-level facilities. In this paper, we show how an HPC application and its execution environment can be embedded within a lightweight guest domain, alongside a domain that runs a conventional OS which is only used for administrative purpose. That permits the execution environment to take advantage of kernel-level facilities to improve performance, which would be hard to achieve in the traditional process model because of lack of support or excessive overhead.

REFERENCES

Note: OCR errors may be found in this Reference List extracted from the full text article. ACM has opted to expose the complete List rather than only correct and linked references.

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