On the Accuracy of Time Measurements in Virtual Machines

While cloud computing permits access to a large pool of experimental infrastructure, the most common form - virtual machines - has been shown to exhibit substantial deficits with respect to the accuracy of time measurements. In our ongoing work, we provide a detailed analysis of these deficits based on various machine configurations. Preliminary results indicate that not the use of virtualization as such, but the potentially uncontrollable utilization of the physical host is a decisive factor for the accuracy of time measurements.