Virtual Parallel Machines Through Virtualization: Impact on MPI Executions

Abstract

Virtual Machines (VM) are used to provide homogeneous environments at low costs, enhanced security of execution through confinment of the application, and sometimes for enabling checkpointing capabilities. They rely on special hardware instructions, or pure software implementations, and are usually located between the hardware and the different operating systems. In this work, we evaluate the impact of virtualization parameter (like the number of VM per physical machine) over applications and micro-benchmarks running inside Message Passing Interface environments to determine the feasability and efficiency of virtual environments for high performance computation emulation.