HPC Performance and Energy-Efficiency of Xen, KVM and VMware Hypervisors

With a growing concern on the considerable energy consumed by HPC platforms and data centers, research efforts are targeting green approaches with higher energy efficiency. In particular, virtualization is emerging as the prominent approach to mutualize the energy consumed by a single server running multiple VMs instances. Even today, it remains unclear whether the overhead induced by virtualization and the corresponding hypervisor middleware suits an environment as high-demanding as an HPC platform. In this paper, we analyze from an HPC perspective the three most widespread virtualization frameworks, namely Xen, KVM, and VMware ESXi and compare them with a baseline environment running in native mode. We performed our experiments on the Grid'5000 platform by measuring the results of the reference HPL benchmark. Power measures were also performed in parallel to quantify the potential energy efficiency of the virtualized environments. In general, our study offers novel incentives toward in-house HPC platforms running without any virtualized frameworks.