Performance comparison of two virtual machine scenarios using an HPC application: a case study using molecular dynamics simulations

ABSTRACT

Obtaining high flexibility to performance-loss ratio is a key challenge of today's HPC virtual environment landscape. And while extensive research has been targeted at extracting more performance from virtual machines, the idea that whether novel virtual machine usage scenarios could lead to high flexibility Vs performance trade-off has received less attention.

We, in this paper, take a step forward by studying and comparing the performance implications of running the Large-scale Atomic/Molecular Massively Parallel Simulator (LAMMPS) application on two virtual machine configurations. First configuration consists of two virtual machines per node with 1 application process per virtual machine. The second configuration consists of 1 virtual machine per node with 2 processes per virtual machine. Xen has been used as an hypervisor and standard Linux as a guest virtual machine. Our results show that the difference in overall performance impact on LAMMPS between the two virtual machine configurations described above is around 3%. We also study the difference in performance impact in terms of each configuration's individual metrics such as CPU, I/O, Memory, and interrupt/context switches.

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