Exploring Infiniband Hardware Virtualization in OpenNebula towards Efficient High-Performance Computing

It has been widely accepted that software virtualization has a big negative impact on high-performance computing (HPC) application performance. This work explores the potential use of Infiniband hardware virtualization in an Open Nebula cloud towards the efficient support of MPI-based workloads. We have implemented, deployed, and tested an Infiniband network on the Fermi Cloud private Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud. To avoid software virtualization towards minimizing the virtualization overhead, we employed a technique called Single Root Input/Output Virtualization (SRIOV). Our solution spanned modifications to the Linux's Hypervisor as well as the Open Nebula manager. We evaluated the performance of the hardware virtualization on up to 56 virtual machines connected by up to 8 DDR Infiniband network links, with micro-benchmarks (latency and bandwidth) as well as with a MPI-intensive application (the HPL Linpack benchmark).