Executing MPI programs on virtual machines in an Internet sharing system

Internet sharing systems aim at federating and utilizing distributed computing resources across the Internet. This paper presents a user-level virtual machine (VM) approach to MPI program execution in an Internet sharing framework. In this approach, the resource consumer has its own operating system running on top of and isolated from, the operating system of the resource provider. We propose an efficient socket virtualization technique to optimize VM network performance. Socket virtualization achieves the same network bandwidth as the physical network. In our LAN environment, it reduces the latency overhead from 112% (using existing TUN/TAP technique) to 35.6%. Performance results on MPI benchmarks show that our virtualization technique incurs small overhead compared with the physical host platform, while gaining in return a higher degree of guest isolation and customization. We also describe the key mechanisms that allow the employment of VMs in an existing Internet sharing system