A Performance Study of Virtual Machines on Multicore Architectures

Cloud computing has promoted the widespread use of virtualized machines. A question arises: How does virtualization influence the performance of running applications? The answer must be a common interest of application developers and users. This paper describes the results of our performance evaluation on a virtualized multicore machine. We tested a set of benchmark applications and detected some general features that should be considered when running applications on a virtualized multicore machine. We also studied the application execution behavior using profiling tools. We found the reason for unexpectedly poor performance of an OpenMP application in a virtualized setting and optimized the program. The optimization resulted in a significant performance gain.