Virtualizing high performance computing

Abstract

While virtualization is widely used in commercial enterprise environments, it has not to date played any significant role in High Performance Computing (HPC). However, with the rise of cloud computing and its promise of computing on demand, the HPC community's interest in virtualization (a key cloud enabler) is increasing. Beyond cloud computing, virtualization offers additional potential benefits for HPC, among them reactive and proactive application fault tolerance, secure and fault-isolated use of shared-resource clusters, dynamic provisioning, job migration, and support for heterogeneous HPC facilities. This paper describes both the promises and challenges in this new, emerging area, including a discussion of performance-related issues