Title: Performance analysis of Linux containers for high performance computing applications

Authors: David Beserra; Edward David Moreno; Patricia Takako Endo; Jymmy Barreto; Stênio Fernandes; Djamel Sadok

Addresses: Universidade Federal de Sergipe, Aracaju, SE, Brazil ' Universidade Federal de Sergipe, Aracaju, SE, Brazil ' Campus Caruaru, University of Pernambuco, Caruaru, PE, Brazil ' Center of Informatics, Federal University of Pernambuco, Recife, PE, Brazil ' Center of Informatics, Federal University of Pernambuco, Recife, PE, Brazil ' Center of Informatics, Federal University of Pernambuco, Recife, PE, Brazil

Abstract: Although cloud infrastructures can be used as High Performance Computing (HPC) platforms, many issues from virtualisation overhead have kept them almost unrelated. However, with advent of container-based virtualisation, this scenario acquires new perspectives because this technique promises to decrease the virtualisation overhead, achieving a near-native performance. In this work, we analyse the performance of a container-based virtualisation solution - Linux Container (LXC) - against a hypervisor-based virtualisation solution - KVM - under HPC activities. For our experiments, we consider CPU and (network and inter-process) communication performance. Results show that hypervisor type can impact distinctly in performance according to resource used by HPC application.

Keywords: cloud computing; HPC; LXC; container-based virtualisation; performance evaluation.

DOI: 10.1504/IJGUC.2017.088266

International Journal of Grid and Utility Computing, 2017 Vol.8 No.4, pp.321 - 329

Received: 13 Nov 2015
Accepted: 20 Jul 2016
Published online: 01 Dec 2017 *

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