Performance Evaluation of OS-Level Virtualization Solutions for HPC Purposes on SoC-Based Systems

Abstract

Systems-on-a-chip (SoC) represents a rupture on the traditional HPC infrastructure and started to be adopted together OS-level virtualization to provide services in Fog and Edge computing scenarios. In this work, we analyzed the performance of OS-level virtualization solutions - Linux Containers (LXC) and Docker - for HPC activities running in SoC systems in order to discover how OS-level virtualization and resource sharing affects the performance of virtualized environments. We evaluated CPU and (network and inter-process) communication performance taking in account two different scenarios: without communication between benchmark processes in execution and; with processes communication in a cooperative way. Results shows that both tools are suitable for HPC applications in SoC systems, despite the notice of some performance reduction due resource sharing.