The Impact of Virtualization on High Performance Computing Clustering in the Cloud

The ongoing pervasiveness of Internet access is intensively increasing Big Data production. This, in turn, increases demand on compute power to process this massive data, and thus rendering High Performance Computing (HPC) into a high solicited service. Based on the paradigm of providing computing as a utility, the Cloud is offering user-friendly infrastructures for processing Big Data, e.g., High Performance Computing as a Service (HPCaaS). Still, HPCaaS performance is tightly coupled with the underlying virtualization technique since the latter is responsible for the creation of virtual machines that carry out data processing jobs. In this paper, the authors evaluate the impact of virtualization on HPCaaS. They track HPC performance under different Cloud virtualization platforms, namely KVM and VMware-ESXi, and compare it against physical clusters. Each tested cluster provided different performance trends. Yet, the overall analysis of the findings proved that the selection of virtualization technology can lead to significant improvements when handling HPCaaS.