Performance evaluation of container-based virtualization for high performance computing environments

Abstract

Virtualization technologies have evolved along with the development of computational environments. Virtualization offered needed features at that time such as isolation, accountability, resource allocation, resource fair sharing and so on. Novel processor technologies bring to commodity computers the possibility to emulate diverse environments where a wide range of computational scenarios can be run. Along with processors evolution, developers have implemented different virtualization mechanisms exhibiting enhanced performance from previous virtualized environments. Recently, operating system-based virtualization technologies captured the attention of communities abroad because their important improvements on performance area. In this paper, the features of three container-based operating systems virtualization tools (LXC, Docker and Singularity) are presented. LXC, Docker, Singularity and bare metal are put under test through a customized single node HPL-Benchmark and a MPI-based application for the multi node testbed. Also the disk I/O performance, Memory (RAM) performance, Network bandwidth and GPU performance are tested for the COS technologies vs bare metal. Preliminary results and conclusions around them are presented and discussed.

Keywords

• Container-based virtualization
• Linux containers
• Singularity
• Docker
• High performance computing