LCM: A lightweight communication mechanism in HPC cloud

Inspired by the concept of cloud computing, the construction of HPC Cloud with traditional HPC resources not only provides new opportunities to address the challenges to the traditional HPC, but also brings many exciting research problems. One of them is how to reduce the network overhead of virtual cluster in HPC cloud. In order to resolve the problem, this paper presents the design and implementation of lightweight communication mechanism for virtual cluster in HPC Cloud, called LCM, which maintains binary compatibility for applications written in standard socket interface. We implemented our design on Xen 3.2 with Linux kernel 2.6.18, and evaluated the speed of file transfer, the running time of NAS Parallel benchmark and binary compatibility using binary image of real socket applications. In our tests, we have proved that LCM realizes the high performance that is comparable to UNIX domain socket and ensures full binary compatibility.