Evaluation of Network Interrupt Tuning on Virtualized Application Performance

nfiniband, as a high-bandwidth, low-latency network interconnect has for most of the last decade been regarded as the fabric of choice for HPC clusters. It is deployed in many commodity cluster, and as of TOP500 list of June 2011, used as the communication network in 41.2% of all systems. However, even as Infiniband usage continues to grow, several factors continue to hinder full utilization of the technology’s capabilities. A recent paper proposed that tuning network interrupt parameters can be done to improve the competitiveness of virtualized performance with that of native. We would look to further evaluate the performance impact of network interrupt tuning on virtualized application performamce, for example cache misses, TLB misses, etc.