Research on the performance of xVM virtual machine based on HPCC

Abstract

The virtual machine (VM) technology has received an increasing interest a spotlight both in the industry and the research communities. Although the potential advantages of virtualization in HPC workloads have been documented, the potential impact to application performance in HPC environments is not clearly understood. This paper presents a study on performance evaluation of virtual HPC systems using High Performance Computing Challenge (HPCC) benchmark suite and xVM as the workload representative and VM technology, respectively. Based on the extended AHP (Analytic Hierarchy Process) method, we propose an efficient performance evaluation model based on extended AHP and analyze the results and quantify the performance overhead of xVM in terms of compute, memory, and network overhead. Our analysis shows that the computational and network performance in HVM is slightly better and the memory performance is significantly better compared to paravirtualization. © 2009 IEEE.