Performance Analysis of LXC for HPC Environments

Abstract

Despite of Cloud infrastructures can be used as High Performance Computing (HPC) platforms, many issues from virtualization overhead had kept them unrelated. However, with advent of container-based virtualizers, this scenario acquires new perspectives because this technique promises to decrease the virtualization overhead, achieving a near-native performance. In this work, we analyzed the performance of a container-based virtualization solution - Linux Container (LXC) - against a hyper visor-based virtualization solution - KVM - under HPC activities. For our experiments, we considered CPU and communication (network and inter-process communication), and results showed the virtualizer type can impact distinctly in performance according to resource used by application.