Minimizing Communication Overheads in Container-based Clouds for HPC Applications

Although the industry has embraced the cloud computing model, there are still significant challenges to be addressed concerning the quality of cloud services. Network-intensive applications may not scale in the cloud due to the sharing of the network infrastructure. In the literature, performance evaluation studies are showing that the network tends to limit the scalability and performance of HPC applications. Therefore, we proposed the aggregation of Network Interface Cards (NICs) in a ready-to-use integration with the OpenNebula cloud manager using Linux containers. We perform a set of experiments using a network microbenchmark to get specific network performance metrics and NAS parallel benchmarks to analyze the performance impact on HPC applications. Our results highlight that the implementation of NIC aggregation improves network performance in terms of throughput and latency. Moreover, HPC applications have different patterns of behavior when using our approach, which depends on communication and the amount of data transferring. While network-intensive applications increased the performance up to 38%, other applications with aggregated NICs maintained the same performance or presented slightly worse performance.