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Benchmarking Parallelism in Unikernels

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Euro-Par 2022: Parallel Processing Workshops (Euro-Par 2022)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 13835))

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Abstract

Virtualisation technologies are widely used in Cloud computing infrastructures, because they can be provisioned cheaply and quickly to meet demand. The common approaches are either to package a Operating System (OS) as a Virtual Machine, or to containerise software with an OS kernel. An emerging alternative are unikernels, which are customised kernels to support just one application. Unikernels are lightweight and an applications has sole use of the kernel, which offers potential for fast, resource efficient and secure execution. For these reasons, unikernels may be idea for parallel computing in the Cloud. However, the parallel performance of unikernel-based Cloud applications has not been extensively studied. This paper presents an evaluation of the OSv unikernel using a parallelised Mandelbrot benchmark, comparing with Docker and a monolithic VM for runtime, parallel speedups and boot-up time. OSv has the fastest boot-up time, and is comparable with the parallel speedups of Docker and the monolithic VM.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Heriot-Watt University, Riccarton, Edinburgh, EH14 4AS, UK

    Akilan Selvacoumar, Robert Stewart, Hans-Wolfgang Loidl & Ahmad Ryad Soobhany

Authors
  1. Akilan Selvacoumar
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  2. Robert Stewart
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  3. Hans-Wolfgang Loidl
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  4. Ahmad Ryad Soobhany
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Akilan Selvacoumar .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK

    Jeremy Singer

  2. University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK

    Yehia Elkhatib

  3. University of Santiago de Compostela, Santiago de Compostela, La Coruña, Spain

    Dora Blanco Heras

  4. Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA, USA

    Patrick Diehl

  5. University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK

    Nick Brown

  6. Universidade de Lisboa, Lisbon, Portugal

    Aleksandar Ilic

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Selvacoumar, A., Stewart, R., Loidl, HW., Soobhany, A.R. (2023). Benchmarking Parallelism in Unikernels. In: Singer, J., Elkhatib, Y., Blanco Heras, D., Diehl, P., Brown, N., Ilic, A. (eds) Euro-Par 2022: Parallel Processing Workshops. Euro-Par 2022. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13835. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-31209-0_23

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-31209-0_23

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-031-31208-3

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-031-31209-0

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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