Slashdot Mirror
Virtualizing a Supercomputer
bridges writes "The V3VEE project has announced the release of version 1.2 of the Palacios virtual machine monitor following the successful testing of Palacios on 4096 nodes of the Sandia Red Storm supercomputer, the 17th-fastest in the world. The added overhead of virtualization is often a show-stopper, but the researchers observed less than 5% overhead for two real, communication-intensive applications running in a virtual machine on Red Storm. Palacios 1.2 supports virtualization of both desktop x86 hardware and Cray XT supercomputers using either AMD SVM or Intel VT hardware virtualization extensions, and is an active open source OS research platform supporting projects at multiple institutions. Palacios is being jointly developed by researchers at Northwestern University, the University of New Mexico, and Sandia National Labs." The ACM's writeup has more details of the work at Sandia.
Imagine a beowulf cluster of beowulf clusters of those! Pwoar.
So if you're virtualizing a supercomputer on a supercomputer, would it not be better to call the host a "super-duper" computer?
Now we'll never need to build another expensive supercomputer. We'll just "virtualize" them on cheap desktops.
Oh. Wait...
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
This is virtualization... Imagine someone Imagining a beowulf cluster of those!
-Matt
--- Need web hosting?
5% may not sound like mubh, cut with 4096 nodes that's over 200 nodes that they are wasting.
What is the point of virtualizing a supercomputer? A 5% performance loss is a pretty big loss, in say a cluster of 100 computers, 5 of them would be wasted translating to thousands of dollars lost with little to show for it.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
It is really pleasant to see more and more OSS projects which are being deployed at national level and large infrastructures.
Hopefully some less greedy company who benefit from such projects will start paying the volunteer developers. But then again, I have found that a lot of times if you are doing something as a hobby/interest/challenge, rather than because you were employed to do it, the outcome will be more refined and efficient. Though I have yet to experience the latter part first hand.
Imagine a Beowulf cluster...
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Virtualizing a Supercomputer is never the correct solution. supercomputers have in their nature a system of managing lesser processes. that system could be extended rather than adding another virtual management system to run parallel to the existing management system burdened with maintaining it as another running process.
The way virtualization works is it is a virtual layer spread across many nodes to avoid any down time when you get
one node that fails, the rest pick up the slack, and without having to stop the running systems. This is using linux architecture to
cluster many computers on the bottom layer, so as to have the look of one mega computer, when it actually is 100 computers or more...etc...
Then we get into supercomputing, which again uses clusters and usually uses linux, to be able to make all the computers act as if it was one big computer, giving the advantage of multi-processors to be able to calculate much faster common operations, etc....
Now combining the 2, we could ....what is the advantage again, of putting a cluster on top of a cluster, I need to understand, because I don't see it, either one of these are used to make a supercomputer per se, but one is virtual, the other is physical....
either case, the advantage is the same from both, but merging the 2, would have too much of a slow down if you ask me, with all the
backend needing to monitor the other backend to load balance , raid, etc.... it just seems like it is a test to see if you can do it, but would you get any real advantage out of it, I am not so sure....someone with knowledge of vms, and supercomputers , please enlighten me.
If you look up their research paper, you will quickly find that important performance issues remain in the area of high performance communication.
Typically this is where supercomputers should excell at, e.g., with a point-to-point latency down to a microsecond,
medium-size message throughputs of tens of Gigabits per second, and really low overheads. You get what you pay for.
However, when you look up this aspect in the paper, they mention a 5 to 11 microsecond absolute overhead (not mentioning the relative one!)
and the graphs showing actual bandwidth measurement comparisons are suddenly log-based..
Agreed, virtualizing high performance communication is a difficult issue. No need trying to hide it this way.
Yeah, open source Palacios development would indeed be FTW, if it existed, but it doesn't.
While the Palacios code itself is open, the development image runs under VMware, which is closed tighter than a tight thing.
If you're looking for an open source development platform for VMMs, this isn't it.