Cloud Virtualization Environment Analysis towards High Performance Storage Solutions

Infiniband, 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. Recent advances in virtualization tools, namely Single Root I/O Virtualization (SR-IOV), have significantly reduced performance overhead. Specifically, SR-IOV exposes the host machine’s physical cards to multiple virtual machines (VMs), rather than requiring full emulation or passthrough of the device into the VM. This advancement allows VMs to not only concurrently share the same physical device, but does so with minimal overhead as compared to previous virtualization techniques that impose 10-15% performance penalty. We intend to perform an evaluation study of network interconnect performance & overhead analysis under different virtual- ization environments. Specifically, we are looking to begin evaluating Infiniband performance of HPC & Cloud Applications on both native and virtual machines. Further analysis includes evaluating parallel file system (PFS) implementations such as Lustre, and glusterFS towards providing a more effective cloud environment integration.