Abstract
Virtualization presents both challenges and opportunities for HPC
systems and applications. This paper reviews them and also offers
technical insights into two key challenges faced by future highend
machines: (1) the I/O challenges they face and (2) the multicore
nature of future HPC platforms. Concerning the latter, we
argue the need to better structure virtualization solutions, to improve
the compute experience of future HPC applications, and to
provide scalability for virtualization solutions on future many-core
platforms. Concerning (1), we present new methods for device virtualization,
along with evidence that such methods can improve the
I/O performance experienced by guest operating systems and applications
running on HPC machines. Experimental results validate
the claims made in (1) and (2), attained with the Xen hypervisor
running on modern multi-core machines. Finally, the paper offers
new directions for research in virtualization for HPC machines.
It describes ways for further improving the effective I/O performance
as seen by HPC applications by extending virtualization to
associate application-relevant functions with I/O data streams and
through QoS support for these streams. Other issues discussed are
reliability enhancements for I/O, and online system and resource
management.