Container-based virtualization technologies such as LXC or Docker have gained a lot of interest recently, especially in the HPC context where they could help to address a number of long-running issues. Even if they have proven to perform better than full-fledged, hypervisorbased, virtualization solutions, there are still a lot of questions about the use of container solutions in the HPC context. This paper evaluates the performance of Linux-based container solutions that rely on cgroups and namespaces using the NAS parallel benchmarks, in various configurations. We show that containers technology has matured over the years, and that performance issues are being solved.
In the field of large-scale distributed systems, experimentation is particularly difficult. The studied systems are complex, often nondeterministic and unreliable, software is plagued with bugs, whereas the experiment workflows are unclear and hard to reproduce. These obstacles led many independent researchers to design tools to control their experiments, boost productivity and improve quality of scientific results.Despite much research in the domain of distributed systems experiment management, the current fragmentation of efforts asks for a general analysis. We therefore propose to build a framework to uncover missing functionality of these tools, enable meaningful comparisons between them and find recommendations for future improvements and research.The contribution in this paper is twofold. First, we provide an extensive list of features offered by general-purpose experiment management tools dedicated to distributed systems research on real platforms. We then use it to assess existing solutions and compare them, outlining possible future paths for improvements.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.