A lightweight virtual machine monitor for Blue Gene/P

  • Authors:

  • Jan Stoess;Udo Steinberg;Volkmar Uhlig;Jens Kehne;Jonathan Appavoo;Amos Waterland

  • Affiliations:

  • This research was partly conducted by the authors while at IBM Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, NY. Faculty of Informatics, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany, HStreaming LLC, USA;Department of Computer Science, Technische Universität Dresden, Germany;HStreaming LLC, USA;This research was partly conducted by the authors while at IBM Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, NY. Faculty of Informatics, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany;Department of Computer Science, Boston University, USA;Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, USA

  • Venue:
  • International Journal of High Performance Computing Applications
  • Year:
  • 2012

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Abstract

In this paper, we present a lightweight, micro-kernel-based virtual machine monitor (VMM) for the Blue Gene/P supercomputer. Our VMM comprises a small 脗µ-kernel with virtualization capabilities and, atop, a user-level VMM component that manages virtual Blue Gene/P cores, memory, and interconnects; we also support running native applications directly atop the 脗µ-kernel. Our design goal is to enable compatibility to standard operating systems such as Linux on BG/P via virtualization, but to also keep the amount of kernel functionality small enough to facilitate shortening the path to applications and lowering operating system noise.Our prototype implementation successfully virtualizes a Blue Gene/P version of Linux with support for Ethernet-based communication mapped onto Blue Gene/P's collective and torus network devices. Our first experiences and experiments show that our VMM still shows a substantial performance hit, and that support for native application environments is a key requirement towards fully exploiting the capabilities of a supercomputer. Altogether, our approach poses an interesting operating system alternative for supercomputers, providing the convenience of a fully featured commodity software stack, while also promising to deliver the scalability and low latency of an HPC operating system.