A Smart HPC Interconnect for Clusters of Virtual Machines

Xen2MX: High-performance communication in virtualized environments

“…However, current approaches do not provide such a software solution to efficiently exploit the hypervisors' interface to the hardware. In previous studies [22,23,25], we have attempted to examine the trade-offs related to device sharing, using custom lower-level protocols. In this work, we move forward to a more generic design, in order to gain insight into the system's internals and, ultimately, optimize the way VMs communicate with the network.…”

“…Numerous studies both in native [8,16] and virtualized environments [5,6,18,20,22,23,24,25,26,40] explore the implications of alternative data-paths that increase the system's I/O throughput, helping applications overcome significant bottlenecks in data retrieval from storage or network devices. However, near-native I/O performance for Virtual Machines (VMs) in a generic cloud environment, built from offthe-shelf components, is still far from being achieved.…”

“…Unfortunately, in the cloud context, I/O-intensive applications suffer from poor performance [22,33,40], due to various intermediate layers that abstract away the physical characteristics of the underlying hardware and multiplex the application's access to I/O resources. This limitation is one of the most important reasons that HPC applications are not widely deployed in virtualized environments [35].Numerous studies both in native [8,16] and virtualized environments [5,6,18,20,22,23,24,25,26,40] explore the implications of alternative data-paths that increase the system's I/O throughput, helping applications overcome significant bottlenecks in data retrieval from storage or network devices. However, near-native I/O performance for Virtual Machines (VMs) in a generic cloud environment, built from offthe-shelf components, is still far from being achieved.…”

Xen2MX: Towards High-Performance Communication in the Cloud

“…However, current approaches do not provide a software solution to efficiently exploit hypervisor abstractions to access hardware. In previous studies [5][6][7] we have attempted to examine the trade-offs related to device sharing using custom lower-level protocols and simple microbenchmarks. We move forward to a more generic design, in order to understand and optimize the way VMs interact with the network in an HPC context.…”

Αποδοτικός Διαμοιρασμός Πόρων Εισόδου / Εξόδου Σε Περιβάλλοντα Εικονικών Μηχανών

“…Πολλές εργασίες σε φυσικά [11,24] και εικονικά [7,8,27,29,31,32,33,34,35,51] περιβάλλοντα ερευνούν τη δυνατότητα παράκαμψης των μονοπατιών δεδομένων που δημιουργούν αυτή την καθυστέρηση με σκοπό την αύξηση της επίδοσης της Ε/E, βοηθώντας τις εφαρμογές να παρακάμψουν τη συμφόρηση στην ανάκτηση/τοποθέτηση δεδομένων από/ προς συσκευές αποθήκευσης ή δικτύωσης. Παρόλα αυτά, σε εικονικό περιβάλλον, η επίδοση των συστημάτων E/E με συμβατικό υλικό, παρουσιάζεται σημαντικά μειωμένη σε σχέση με την αντίστοιχη σε φυσικό περιβάλλον.…”