Performance Evaluation of Hypervisors for HPC Applications

High Performance Computing (HPC) aggregates computing power in order to solve large and complex problems in different knowledge areas. Nowadays, HPC users can utilize virtualized infrastructures as a low-cost alternative to deploy their applications. However, virtualization brings some challenges for HPC, specially in regard to overhead caused by hyper visors. In this work, our main goal is to analyze the performance of two hyper visors (KVM and Virtual Box) under HPC activities, considering full virtualization, and Para virtualization approaches. We used the HPC Challenge Benchmark (HPCC) to evaluate processor, RAM, inter-process communication and network communication performance. Our results show KVM in Para virtualization mode has a similar performance of a native cluster.