Evaluating the performance and intrusiveness of virtual machines for desktop grid computing

  • Authors:
  • Patricio Domingues;Filipe Araujo;Luis Silva

  • Affiliations:
  • School of Technology and Management - Polytechnic Institute of Leiria, Portugal;CISUC, Dept. of Informatics Engineering, University of Coimbra, Portugal;CISUC, Dept. of Informatics Engineering, University of Coimbra, Portugal

  • Venue:
  • IPDPS '09 Proceedings of the 2009 IEEE International Symposium on Parallel&Distributed Processing
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

We experimentally evaluate the performance overhead of the virtual environments VMware Player, QEMU, VirtualPC and VirtualBox on a dual-core machine. Firstly, we assess the performance of a Linux guest OS running on a virtual machine by separately benchmarking the CPU, file I/O and the network bandwidth. These values are compared to the performance achieved when applications are run on a Linux OS directly over the physical machine. Secondly, we measure the impact that a virtual machine running a volunteer @home project worker causes on a host OS. Results show that performance attainable on virtual machines depends simultaneously on the virtual machine software and on the application type, with CPU-bound applications much less impacted than IO-bound ones. Additionally, the performance impact on the host OS caused by a virtual machine using all the virtual CPU, ranges from 10% to 35%, depending on the virtual environment.