The cost of virtualization implementation in volunteer computing

The advantages of using virtualization can be impaired if it can not deliver sufficient performance. Running applications in virtualized environment incur performance overheads regarding to the virtualization functionalities like initialization virtual machine image, the booting time of virtual machine, starting, pausing and turning off the virtual machine. Virtualization functionality has implication on the host performance and when it is mixed with volunteer computing in order to undertake the execution of jobs, it becomes a serious challenge as volunteer computing aims to use public dedicated resources in an efficient manner to maximize the work done. In order to adopt virtualization technology in volunteer computing, the performance impact of virtualization on volunteer computing middleware needs to be distinguished. In this paper, we experimentally evaluate the virtualization functionalities overhead by comparing the job application execution in two scenarios: 1) executing job application in a virtualized environment by using vboxwrapper (The latest BOINC virtualization approach) and 2) executing job application directly on the host OS. Based on the result, virtualization fashion imposed up to 5 minutes pre-execution overhead when three jobs performed in parallel. The storage overhead ranged from 13% to 26%, depending on the number of jobs that are executing in parallel. This amount of overhead for memory ranged from 6.5% to 20%.