CSR: Eager: HPC Virtualization with SR-IOV

Ohio State University, The, Columbus OH

Investigators

Abstract

The recently introduced Single Root I/O Virtualization (SR-IOV) technique for InfiniBand and High Speed Ethernet provides native I/O virtualization capabilities and enables us to provision the internal PCI bus interface between multiple Virtual Machines (VMs). However, achieving near native throughput for HPC applications that use both point-to-point and collective operations on virtualized multi-core systems with SR-IOV presents a new set of challenges for the designers of high performance middleware, such as MPI. In order to solve this problem, this project aims to address the following set of challenges: 1) How to redesign MPI communication library to achieve efficient locality-aware communication and facilitate fair resource sharing on modern virtualized high performance clusters, with SR-IOV? 2) Can communication libraries be designed to deliver the best communication performance across different VM subscription policies and network communication modes? 3) What are the the challenges involved in designing support for advanced features such as, live migration, Quality of Service, and I/O storage virtualization? and 4) What kind of benefits, in terms of performance and scalability, can be achieved by the proposed approach for HPC applications? A synergistic and comprehensive research plan is proposed to address the above challenges for HPC Virtualization on clusters with SR-IOV and study its impact for a set of HPC applications.