Analysis and Simulation of HPC Applications in Virtualized Data Centers

Cloud computing is a consolidation environment that hosts heterogeneous applications. Currently, clouds use virtualization technologies to provide an isolated execution environment and agile resource provisioning. Furthermore, live migration is widely exploited to achieve energy saving. However, consolidation and live migration can cause resource contention and utilization overhead that influence application performance. In this paper, we implement a network model and a memory subsystem model into CloudSim simulator. Then, we present a thorough analysis of the High Performance Computing NPB suite including memory bandwidth demand, communication patterns between processes, and migration overhead. To study the performance of the NPB Benchmark suite, we simulate the behaviour of these benchmarks including multi-thread communication via shared memory, multi-process communication via network. Thus, this allows implementing efficient VMs scheduling and resource provisioning policies. The results show that using CPU utilization as a trigger to perform management action such as VM migration is misleading and might aggravate application performance. Furthermore, we present a power model including the utilization of CPU, memory-bus, and network. This model provides a precise estimation of power consumption.