Performance Evaluation of Container-based Virtualization for High Performance Computing Environments

TL;DR

This paper evaluates the performance of container-based virtualization tools (LXC, Docker, Singularity) in high-performance computing environments across various metrics, comparing them to bare metal systems.

Contribution

It provides a comparative analysis of container-based virtualization tools' performance in HPC settings, including empirical testing of multiple system components.

Findings

Container-based virtualization shows varying performance impacts across different metrics.

Preliminary results indicate certain containers approach bare metal performance in some areas.

Performance differences depend on specific system components and workloads.

Abstract

Virtualization technologies have evolved along with the development of computational environments since 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, system developers have created different virtualization mechanisms where each new development enhanced the performance of previous virtualized environments. Recently, operating system-based virtualization technologies captured the attention of communities abroad (from industry to academy and research) 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.