Title: ElBench: a microbenchmark to evaluate virtual machine and container strategies on executing elastic applications in the cloud

Authors: Rodrigo Da Rosa Righi; Douglas Brauner; Vinicius Facco Rodrigues; Cristiano André Da Costa; Adenauer Correa Yamin

Addresses: Applied Computing Graduate Program, Unisinos University, São Leopoldo, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil ' Applied Computing Graduate Program, Unisinos University, São Leopoldo, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil ' Applied Computing Graduate Program, Unisinos University, São Leopoldo, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil ' Applied Computing Graduate Program, Unisinos University, São Leopoldo, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil ' Centro de Ciências Sociais e Tecnológicas, Universidade Católica de Pelotas, Pelotas, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil

Abstract: One of the main features of cloud computing is the elasticity of resources. Virtual machines (VMs) are the typical implementation of this feature since they offer mechanisms for replication and isolation. In addition to VMs, today we perceive the emergence of the container technology to implement these facilities; however, our investigation did not list an initiative that describes a comparison formalism to evaluate both techniques to run HPC elastic applications in the cloud. This article explores this gap, presenting a microbenchmark named ElBench, which focuses on providing a framework to compare VM and container on executing elastic parallel applications in the cloud. Using AutoElastic, a middleware to run elastic parallel applications in the cloud, a scientific application and two workloads, ElBench methodology generated results in favour of containers: on average, compared to VMs they provide a gain of 20% in the execution time and 60% savings in terms of cost.

Keywords: benchmark; cloud elasticity; high-performance computing; HPC; container; virtual machine; virtualisation.

DOI: 10.1504/IJCSE.2020.106068

International Journal of Computational Science and Engineering, 2020 Vol.21 No.3, pp.457 - 469

Received: 13 Apr 2018
Accepted: 28 Feb 2019
Published online: 27 Mar 2020 *

Full-text access for editors Full-text access for subscribers Purchase this article Comment on this article