High-performance aspects in virtualized infrastructures

In this paper we analyse the suitability of computing clouds, i.e. large-scale virtualized infrastructures for high-performance applications that are normally executed on specialised clusters or supercomputers. We classify such applications according to their requirements on different system components and present measurements of virtualization software overhead for these components. Based on the results, we discuss cloud-tolerant problems and address surprising performance effects observed in different hypervisors.