Performance analysis of mdx II: A next-generation cloud platform for cross-disciplinary data science research

TL;DR

This paper evaluates mdx II, a cloud platform based on OpenStack, demonstrating its superior performance over AWS in data science workloads, with minimal virtualization overhead for compute-intensive tasks.

Contribution

The paper provides a comprehensive performance comparison of mdx II with AWS, highlighting its advantages for high-performance data analytics and insights into virtualization overheads.

Findings

mdx II outperforms AWS in floating-point and network throughput

Virtualization overhead is minimal for compute-intensive workloads

Memory-intensive benchmarks experience larger virtualization overheads

Abstract

mdx II is an Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud platform designed to accelerate data science research and foster cross-disciplinary collaborations among universities and research institutions in Japan. Unlike traditional high-performance computing systems, mdx II leverages OpenStack to provide customizable and isolated computing environments consisting of virtual machines, virtual networks, and advanced storage. This paper presents a comprehensive performance evaluation of mdx II, including a comparison to Amazon Web Services (AWS). We evaluated the performance of a 16-vCPU VM from multiple aspects including floating-point computing performance, memory throughput, network throughput, file system and object storage performance, and real-world application performance. Compared to an AWS 16-vCPU instance, the results indicated that mdx II outperforms AWS in many aspects and demonstrated that mdx II holds significant promise for high-performance data analytics (HPDA) workloads. We also evaluated the virtualization overhead using a 224-vCPU VM occupying an entire host. The results suggested that the virtualization overhead is minimal for compute-intensive benchmarks, while memory-intensive benchmarks experienced larger overheads. These findings are expected to help users of mdx II to obtain high performance for their data science workloads and offer insights to the designers of future data-centric cloud platforms.