Universidade federal de sergipe centro de ciências exatas e tecnológicas programa de pós-graduação em ciência da computação performance analysis of virtualization technologies in high performance computing environments

High Performance Computing (HPC) aggregates computing power in order to solve large and complex problems in different knowledge areas, such as science and engineering, ranging from 3D real-time medical images to simulation of the universe. Nowadays, HPC users can utilize virtualized Cloud infrastructures as a low-cost alternative to deploy their applications. Despite of Cloud infrastructures can be used as HPC platforms, many issues from virtualization overhead have kept them almost unrelated. In this work, we analyze the performance of some virtualization solutions Linux Containers (LXC), Docker, VirtualBox and KVM under HPC activities. For our experiments, we consider CPU, (physical network and internal buses) communication and disk I/O performance. Results show that different virtualization technologies can impact distinctly in performance according to hardware resource type used by HPC application and resource sharing conditions adopted.