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.

Comments

Cool.

[John Hasler]

Now we'll never need to build another expensive supercomputer. We'll just "virtualize" them on cheap desktops.

Oh. Wait...

Re:Cool.

[TubeSteak]

Now we'll never need to build another expensive supercomputer. We'll just "virtualize" them on cheap desktops.

I think you've got it backwards.
Now we're virtualizing cheap desktops on supercomputers.

What they're doing only makes sense if 5% of 4096 nodes* is cheaper than coding your app to run natively on the supercomputer.
Like really big hard drives, when you get up to supercomputer levels of performance, 5% is a lot to give away.

*Anyone know exactly what a node entails?

Re:Cool.

[Tynin]

*Anyone know exactly what a node entails?

A node is generally just a fancy name for a computer in a cluster. Nodes don't always need a OS locally (getting it via PXE), and may have some special hardware. But honestly in my experience, a node is a node if the systems architect wants to call it one.

Other way

[Wrexs0ul]

This is virtualization... Imagine someone Imagining a beowulf cluster of those!

-Matt

Re:so they are 'only' wasting 200 machines

[Barny]

Well, not sure how good they are now, but back when I studied at Uni we examined a few super-computer clusters and the rule of thumb in most cases was 1 CPU core per node was stuck doing IO for that node anyway, this was all before the move to Hypertransport with AMD though, so it may be much different for them now.

The fact was, it was a number that was constant, it wouldn't get worse with more nodes, it was always x nodes lost per y nodes, as this is. Just add more nodes :)

A worse problem would be if it was x^2 nodes per y nodes, then you're just throwing away money adding more.

Re:Why?

[Spazed]

Most of them would be running an application done in C/C++ or some other low level language with threading. The whole advantage of super computers isn't that they have an absurd ghz rating, but an insane amount of cores. This could be useful for testing how a network of desktop computers would work, which it sounds like from the summary they are doing.

TL:DR; Normal desktop software doesn't run faster on a super computer than on your 4 year old laptop.

Re:Why?

[John Hasler]

> What is the point of virtualizing a supercomputer?

They'll be able to reload the image of your stellar evolution simulation in a few seconds after the guy doing nuclear weapons simulations has had his time. Never mind that the two simulations don't even run under the same OS.