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Deployment of Virtual InfiniBand Clusters with Multi-tenancy for Cloud Computing

Authors:
Viktor Mauch

Keywords: HPC, InfiniBand, Cloud Computing, Virtualization, Openstack

Abstract:
Today, most high performance computing (HPC) systems are equipped with high-speed interconnects providing low communication and synchronization latencies in order to run tightly coupled parallel computing jobs. They are typically managed and operated by individual institutions and offer a fixed capacity and static runtime environment with a limited selection of applications, libraries and system software components. On the contrary, a cloud-based Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) model for HPC resources promises more flexibility, as it enables elastic on-demand provisioning of virtual clusters and allows users to modify the runtime environment down to the operating system level. The goal of this research effort is the general demonstration of a prototypic HPC IaaS system allowing automated provisioning of virtualized HPC resources while retaining high and predictable performance. We present an approach to use high-speed cluster interconnects like InfiniBand within an IaaS environment. Our prototypic system is based on the cloud computing framework Openstack in combination with the Single Root - I/O Virtualization (SR-IOV) mechanism for PCI device virtualization. Our evaluation shows that, with this approach, we can successfully provide dynamically isolated partitions consisting of multiple virtual machines connected over virtualized InfiniBand devices. Users are put in the position to request their own virtualized HPC cluster on demand. They are able to extend or shrink the assigned infrastructure and to change the runtime environment according to their needs. To ensure the suitability for HPC applications, we evaluate the performance of a virtualized cluster compared to a physical environment by running latency and High-Performance Linpack (HPL) benchmarks.

Pages: 66 to 69

Copyright: Copyright (c) IARIA, 2015

Publication date: March 22, 2015

Published in: conference

ISSN: 2308-4294

ISBN: 978-1-61208-388-9

Location: Nice, France

Dates: from March 22, 2015 to March 27, 2015