Minimal-overhead virtualization of a large scale supercomputer

  • Authors:

  • John R. Lange;Kevin Pedretti;Peter Dinda;Patrick G. Bridges;Chang Bae;Philip Soltero;Alexander Merritt

  • Affiliations:

  • University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, USA;Sandia National Laboratories, Albuquerque, NM, USA;Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, USA;University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM, USA;Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, USA;University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM, USA;Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, USA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 7th ACM SIGPLAN/SIGOPS international conference on Virtual execution environments
  • Year:
  • 2011

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.01

Visualization

Abstract

Virtualization has the potential to dramatically increase the usability and reliability of high performance computing (HPC) systems. However, this potential will remain unrealized unless overheads can be minimized. This is particularly challenging on large scale machines that run carefully crafted HPC OSes supporting tightly-coupled, parallel applications. In this paper, we show how careful use of hardware and VMM features enables the virtualization of a large-scale HPC system, specifically a Cray XT4 machine, with