A Light-Weight Virtual Machine Monitor for Blue Gene/P

In this paper, we present a light-weight, micro–kernel-based virtual machine monitor (VMM) for the Blue Gene/P Su-percomputer. Our VMM comprises a small µ-kernel with virtualization capabilities and, atop, a user-level VMM com-ponent that manages virtual BG/P cores, memory, and in-terconnects; we also support running native applications directly atop the µ-kernel. Our design goal is to enable compatibility to standard OSes such as Linux on BG/P via virtualization, but to also keep the amount of kernel func-tionality small enough to facilitate shortening the path to applications and lowering OS noise. Our prototype implementation successfully virtualizes a BG/P version of Linux with support for Ethernet-based communication mapped onto BG/P’s collective and torus network devices. First experiences and experiments show that our VMM still shows a substantial performance hit; nevertheless, our approach poses an interesting OS alter-native for Supercomputers, providing the convenience of a fully-featured commodity software stack, while also promis-ing to deliver the scalability and low latency of an HPC OS. 1