High-Performance Virtual Machine Migration Framework for MPI Applications on SR-IOV Enabled InfiniBand Clusters

High-speed interconnects (e.g. InfiniBand) have been widely deployed on modern HPC clusters. With the emergence of HPC in the cloud, high-speed interconnects have paved their way into the cloud with recently introduced Single Root I/O Virtualization (SR-IOV) technology, which is able to provide efficient sharing of high-speed interconnect resources and achieve near-native I/O performance. However, recent studies have shown that SR-IOV-based virtual networks prevent virtual machine migration, which is an essential virtualization capability towards high availability and resource provisioning. Although several initial solutions have been pro- posed in the literature to solve this problem, our investigations show that there are still many restrictions on these proposed approaches, such as depending on specific network adapters and/or hypervisors, which will limit the usage scope of these solutions on HPC environments. In this paper, we propose a high-performance virtual machine migration framework for MPI applications on SR-IOV enabled InfiniBand clusters. Our proposed method does not need any modification to the hypervisor and InfiniBand drivers and it can efficiently handle virtual machine (VM) migration with SR-IOV IB device. Our evaluation results indicate that the proposed design is able to not only achieve fast VM migration speed but also guarantee the high performance for MPI applications during the migration in the HPC cloud. At the application level, for NPB LU benchmark running inside VM, our proposed design is able to completely hide the migration overhead through the computation and migration overlapping. Furthermore, our proposed design shows good scaling when migrating multiple VMs.