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SR-IOV: Performance Benefits for Virtualized Interconnects

Published: 13 July 2014 Publication History

Abstract

The demand for virtualization within high-performance computing is rapidly growing as new communities, driven by both new application stacks and new computing modalities, continue to grow and expand. While virtualization has traditionally come with significant penalties in I/O performance that have precluded its use in mainstream large-scale computing environments, new standards such as Single Root I/O Virtualization (SR-IOV) are emerging that promise to diminish the performance gap and make high-performance virtualization possible.
To this end, we have evaluated SR-IOV in the context of both virtualized InfiniBand and virtualized 10 gigabit Ethernet (GbE) using micro-benchmarks and real-world applications. We compare the performance of these interconnects on non-virtualized environments, Amazon's SR-IOV-enabled C3 instances, and our own SR-IOV-enabled InfiniBand cluster and show that SR-IOV significantly reduces the performance losses caused by virtualization. InfiniBand demonstrates less than 2% loss of bandwidth and less than 10% increase in latency when virtualized with SR-IOV. Ethernet also benefits, although less dramatically, when SR-IOV is enabled on Amazon's cloud.

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Cited By

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  • (2025)State-of-the-art virtualisation technologies for the centralised automotive E/E architectureFrontiers in Future Transportation10.3389/ffutr.2025.15193906Online publication date: 17-Feb-2025
  • (2024)AppSteer: Framework for Improving Multicore Scalability of Network Functions via Application-aware Packet Steering2024 IEEE 24th International Symposium on Cluster, Cloud and Internet Computing (CCGrid)10.1109/CCGrid59990.2024.00012(18-27)Online publication date: 6-May-2024
  • (2024)Analysis of SR-IOV in Docker containers using RTT measurementsComputer Communications10.1016/j.comcom.2024.107961228:COnline publication date: 1-Dec-2024
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Published In

cover image ACM Other conferences
XSEDE '14: Proceedings of the 2014 Annual Conference on Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment
July 2014
445 pages
ISBN:9781450328937
DOI:10.1145/2616498
  • General Chair:
  • Scott Lathrop,
  • Program Chair:
  • Jay Alameda
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

In-Cooperation

  • NSF: National Science Foundation
  • Drexel University
  • Indiana University: Indiana University

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 13 July 2014

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Author Tags

  1. Parallel computing
  2. cloud computing
  3. infiniband
  4. virtualization

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  • Research-article
  • Research
  • Refereed limited

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XSEDE '14

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XSEDE '14 Paper Acceptance Rate 80 of 120 submissions, 67%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 129 of 190 submissions, 68%

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Cited By

View all
  • (2025)State-of-the-art virtualisation technologies for the centralised automotive E/E architectureFrontiers in Future Transportation10.3389/ffutr.2025.15193906Online publication date: 17-Feb-2025
  • (2024)AppSteer: Framework for Improving Multicore Scalability of Network Functions via Application-aware Packet Steering2024 IEEE 24th International Symposium on Cluster, Cloud and Internet Computing (CCGrid)10.1109/CCGrid59990.2024.00012(18-27)Online publication date: 6-May-2024
  • (2024)Analysis of SR-IOV in Docker containers using RTT measurementsComputer Communications10.1016/j.comcom.2024.107961228:COnline publication date: 1-Dec-2024
  • (2023)Containing Low Tail-Latencies in Packet Processing Using Lightweight Virtualization2023 35th International Teletraffic Congress (ITC-35)10.1109/ITC-3560063.2023.10555759(1-9)Online publication date: 3-Oct-2023
  • (2023)DAQS: Dynamic and Accurate QoS for SR-IOV2023 14th International Conference on Information and Communication Technology Convergence (ICTC)10.1109/ICTC58733.2023.10392450(1440-1442)Online publication date: 11-Oct-2023
  • (2023)Measuring the impact of SR-IOV and virtualization on packet round-trip timeComputer Communications10.1016/j.comcom.2023.09.013211:C(193-215)Online publication date: 1-Nov-2023
  • (2022)HVNet: Hardware-Assisted Virtual Networking on a Single Physical HostIEEE INFOCOM 2022 - IEEE Conference on Computer Communications Workshops (INFOCOM WKSHPS)10.1109/INFOCOMWKSHPS54753.2022.9798351(1-6)Online publication date: 2-May-2022
  • (2022)Research on evaluation model and technology of 5G core network User Plane Function2022 International Conference on Information Processing and Network Provisioning (ICIPNP)10.1109/ICIPNP57450.2022.00036(134-136)Online publication date: Sep-2022
  • (2021)Performance benchmarking and auto-tuning for scientific applications on virtual clusterThe Journal of Supercomputing10.1007/s11227-021-04103-w78:5(6174-6206)Online publication date: 11-Oct-2021
  • (2020)Enabling High‐Performance Cloud Computing for Earth Science Modeling on Over a Thousand Cores: Application to the GEOS‐Chem Atmospheric Chemistry ModelJournal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems10.1029/2020MS00206412:5Online publication date: 6-May-2020
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