Performance comparison of two virtual machine scenarios using an hpc application: a case study using molecular dynamics simulations

Obtaining high flexibility to performance-loss ratio is a key challenge of today’s HPC virtual environment landscape. And while extensive research has been targeted at extract-ing more performance from virtual machines, the idea that whether novel virtual machine usage scenarios could lead to high flexibility Vs performance trade-off has received less attention. We, in this paper, take a step forward by studying and comparing the performance implications of running the Large-scale Atomic/Molecular Massively Parallel Simula-tor (LAMMPS) application on two virtual machine configu-rations. First configuration consists of two virtual machines per node with 1 application process per virtual machine. The second configuration consists of 1 virtual machine per node with 2 processes per virtual machine. Xen has been used as an hypervisor and standard linux as a guest virtual machine. Our results show that the difference in overall performance impact on LAMMPS between the two virtual machine con-figurations described above is around 3%. We also study the difference in performance impact in terms of each configu-ration’s individual metrics such as CPU, I/O, Memory, and interrupt/context switches