Effects of virtualization on a scientific application running a hyperspectral radiative transfer code on virtual machines

Abstract

The topic of system-level virtualization has recently begun to receive interest for high performance computing (HPC). This is in part due to the isolation and encapsulation offered by the virtual machine. These traits enable applications to customize their environments and maintain consistent software configurations in their virtual domains. Additionally, there are mechanisms that can be used for fault tolerance like live virtual machine migration. Given these attractive benefits to virtualization, a fundamental question arises, how does this effect my scientific application? We use this as the premise for our paper and observe a real-world scientific code running on a Xen virtual machine. We studied the effects of running a radiative transfer simulation, Hydrolight, on a virtual machine. We discuss our methodology and report observations regarding the usage of virtualization with this application.