Virtual Machine Aware Communication Libraries for High Performance Computing

Overview

As the size and complexity of modern computing systems keep increasing to meet the demanding requirements of High Performance Computing (HPC) applications, manageability is becoming a critical concern to achieve both high performance and high productivity computing. Meanwhile, Virtual Machine (VM) technologies have become popular in both industry and academia due to various features designed to ease system management and administration. This paper follows three steps to demonstrate the ability to achieve near-native performance in a VM-based environment for HPC. First, they propose Inter-VM Communication (IVC). Second, they design a VM-aware MPI library based on MVAPICH2 (a popular MPI library) Finally, they evaluate MVAPICH2-ivc on clusters featuring multi-core systems and high performance InfiniBand interconnects.