Performance evaluation of a lightweight virtualization solution for HPC I/O scenarios

Abstract

Our investigation aims to answer which scenarios LXC, a lightweight virtualization solution, can offer a better performance than KVM, a hypervisor-based virtualization, or even equal to native environments. For that, we are considering HPC I/O bound applications and the effects of resource sharing on the performance of virtualized environments with both tools. We conducted experiments with traditional benchmarks in two different scenarios: without communication between benchmark processes in execution and; with processes communication in a cooperative way. Results indicate that LXC can offer a better performance for I/O-bound applications in most cases than KVM; and LXC is less affected while we increase the degree of resource sharing between multiple abstractions hosted at the same host server.