Evaluating the Performance of Resource Overcommitted Virtualized Systems

In this paper, we investigate the feasibility and benefits of resource overcommitment for compute intensive HPC applications in virtualized systems. We focus on overcommitting the CPU resource of a virtualized system for shared memory multi-threaded applications. We first study the behavior of HPC applications in a dedicated configuration where the resources are not overcommitted and not shared with other applications. Second, we evaluate the performance of the applications in a resource overcommitted configuration where the resources are overcommitted and shared with other applications. At last, we discuss issues toward modeling the performance of a resource overcommitted system. The performance modeling will help us utilize the system efficiently.