3,133 research outputs found
Evaluation of Docker Containers for Scientific Workloads in the Cloud
The HPC community is actively researching and evaluating tools to support
execution of scientific applications in cloud-based environments. Among the
various technologies, containers have recently gained importance as they have
significantly better performance compared to full-scale virtualization, support
for microservices and DevOps, and work seamlessly with workflow and
orchestration tools. Docker is currently the leader in containerization
technology because it offers low overhead, flexibility, portability of
applications, and reproducibility. Singularity is another container solution
that is of interest as it is designed specifically for scientific applications.
It is important to conduct performance and feature analysis of the container
technologies to understand their applicability for each application and target
execution environment. This paper presents a (1) performance evaluation of
Docker and Singularity on bare metal nodes in the Chameleon cloud (2) mechanism
by which Docker containers can be mapped with InfiniBand hardware with RDMA
communication and (3) analysis of mapping elements of parallel workloads to the
containers for optimal resource management with container-ready orchestration
tools. Our experiments are targeted toward application developers so that they
can make informed decisions on choosing the container technologies and
approaches that are suitable for their HPC workloads on cloud infrastructure.
Our performance analysis shows that scientific workloads for both Docker and
Singularity based containers can achieve near-native performance. Singularity
is designed specifically for HPC workloads. However, Docker still has
advantages over Singularity for use in clouds as it provides overlay networking
and an intuitive way to run MPI applications with one container per rank for
fine-grained resources allocation
Assessing load-sharing within optimistic simulation platforms
The advent of multi-core machines has lead to the need for revising the architecture of modern simulation platforms. One recent proposal we made attempted to explore the viability of load-sharing for optimistic simulators run on top of these types of machines. In this article, we provide an extensive experimental study for an assessment of the effects on run-time dynamics by a load-sharing architecture that has been implemented within the ROOT-Sim package, namely an open source simulation platform adhering to the optimistic synchronization paradigm. This experimental study is essentially aimed at evaluating possible sources of overheads when supporting load-sharing. It has been based on differentiated workloads allowing us to generate different execution profiles in terms of, e.g., granularity/locality of the simulation events. © 2012 IEEE
On a Catalogue of Metrics for Evaluating Commercial Cloud Services
Given the continually increasing amount of commercial Cloud services in the
market, evaluation of different services plays a significant role in
cost-benefit analysis or decision making for choosing Cloud Computing. In
particular, employing suitable metrics is essential in evaluation
implementations. However, to the best of our knowledge, there is not any
systematic discussion about metrics for evaluating Cloud services. By using the
method of Systematic Literature Review (SLR), we have collected the de facto
metrics adopted in the existing Cloud services evaluation work. The collected
metrics were arranged following different Cloud service features to be
evaluated, which essentially constructed an evaluation metrics catalogue, as
shown in this paper. This metrics catalogue can be used to facilitate the
future practice and research in the area of Cloud services evaluation.
Moreover, considering metrics selection is a prerequisite of benchmark
selection in evaluation implementations, this work also supplements the
existing research in benchmarking the commercial Cloud services.Comment: 10 pages, Proceedings of the 13th ACM/IEEE International Conference
on Grid Computing (Grid 2012), pp. 164-173, Beijing, China, September 20-23,
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