Xen and the art of virtualization
SOSP '03 Proceedings of the nineteenth ACM symposium on Operating systems principles
Diagnosing performance overheads in the xen virtual machine environment
Proceedings of the 1st ACM/USENIX international conference on Virtual execution environments
A case for high performance computing with virtual machines
Proceedings of the 20th annual international conference on Supercomputing
The impact of paravirtualized memory hierarchy on linear algebra computational kernels and software
HPDC '08 Proceedings of the 17th international symposium on High performance distributed computing
Proceedings of the 2nd workshop on System-level virtualization for high performance computing
Investigating the TLB Behavior of High-end Scientific Applications on Commodity Microprocessors
ISPASS '08 Proceedings of the ISPASS 2008 - IEEE International Symposium on Performance Analysis of Systems and software
Paravirtualization for HPC systems
ISPA'06 Proceedings of the 2006 international conference on Frontiers of High Performance Computing and Networking
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Virtualization technology has been gaining acceptance in the scientific community due to its overall flexibility in running HPC applications. It has been reported that a specific class of applications is better suited to a particular type of virtualization scheme or implementation. For example, Xen has been shown to perform with little overhead for compute-bound applications. Such a study, although useful, does not allow us to generalize conclusions beyond the performance analysis of that application which is explicitly executed. An explanation of why the generalization described above is difficult, may be due to the versatility in applications, which leads to different overheads in virtual environments. For example, two similar applications may spend disproportionate amount of time in their respective library code when run in virtual environments. In this paper, we aim to study such potential causes by investigating the behavior and identifying patterns of various overheads for HPC benchmark applications. Based on the investigation of the overhead profiles for different benchmarks, we aim to address questions such as: Are the overhead profiles for a particular type of benchmarks (such as compute-bound) similar or are there grounds to conclude otherwise?