Efficiency Assessment of Parallel Workloads on Virtualized Resources

In cloud computing, virtual containers on physical resources are provisioned to requesting users. Resource providers may pack as many containers as possible onto each of their physical machines, or may pack specific types and quantities of virtual containers based on user or system QoS objectives. Such elastic provisioning schemes for resource sharing may present major challenges to scientific parallel applications that require task synchronization during execution. Such elastic schemes may also inadvertently lower utilization of computing resources. In this paper, we describe the elasticity constraint effect and ripple effect that cause a negative impact to application response time and system utilization. We quantify the impact using real workload traces through simulation. Then, we demonstrate that some resource scheduling techniques can be effective in mitigating the impacts. We find that a tradeoff is needed among the elasticity of virtual containers, the complexity of scheduling algorithms, and the response time of applications.