983 research outputs found
Enhancing HPC on Virtual Systems in Clouds through Optimizing Virtual Overlay Networks
Virtual Ethernet overlay provides a powerful model for realizing virtual distributed and parallel computing systems with strong isolation, portability, and recoverability properties. However, in extremely high throughput and low latency networks, such overlays can suffer from bandwidth and latency limitations, which is of particular concern in HPC environments. Through a careful and quantitative analysis, I iden- tify three core issues limiting performance: delayed and excessive virtual interrupt delivery into guests, copies between host and guest data buffers during encapsulation, and the semantic gap between virtual Ethernet features and underlying physical network features. I propose three novel optimizations in response: optimistic timer- free virtual interrupt injection, zero-copy cut-through data forwarding, and virtual TCP offload. These optimizations improve the latency and bandwidth of the overlay network on 10 Gbps Ethernet and InfiniBand interconnects, resulting in near-native performance for a wide range of microbenchmarks and MPI application benchmarks
ASETS: A SDN Empowered Task Scheduling System for HPCaaS on the Cloud
With increasing demands for High Performance
Computing (HPC), new ideas and methods are emerged to utilize
computing resources more efficiently. Cloud Computing appears
to provide benefits such as resource pooling, broad network
access and cost efficiency for the HPC applications. However,
moving the HPC applications to the cloud can face several key
challenges, primarily, the virtualization overhead, multi-tenancy
and network latency. Software-Defined Networking (SDN) as an
emerging technology appears to pave the road and provide
dynamic manipulation of cloud networking such as topology,
routing, and bandwidth allocation. This paper presents a new
scheme called ASETS which targets dynamic configuration and
monitoring of cloud networking using SDN to improve the
performance of HPC applications and in particular task
scheduling for HPC as a service on the cloud (HPCaaS). Further,
SETSA, (SDN-Empowered Task Scheduler Algorithm) is
proposed as a novel task scheduling algorithm for the offered
ASETS architecture. SETSA monitors the network bandwidth to
take advantage of its changes when submitting tasks to the
virtual machines. Empirical analysis of the algorithm in different
case scenarios show that SETSA has significant potentials to
improve the performance of HPCaaS platforms by increasing the
bandwidth efficiency and decreasing task turnaround time. In
addition, SETSAW, (SETSA Window) is proposed as an
improvement of the SETSA algorithm
Exploring Scientific Application Performance Using Large Scale Object Storage
One of the major performance and scalability bottlenecks in large scientific
applications is parallel reading and writing to supercomputer I/O systems. The
usage of parallel file systems and consistency requirements of POSIX, that all
the traditional HPC parallel I/O interfaces adhere to, pose limitations to the
scalability of scientific applications. Object storage is a widely used storage
technology in cloud computing and is more frequently proposed for HPC workload
to address and improve the current scalability and performance of I/O in
scientific applications. While object storage is a promising technology, it is
still unclear how scientific applications will use object storage and what the
main performance benefits will be. This work addresses these questions, by
emulating an object storage used by a traditional scientific application and
evaluating potential performance benefits. We show that scientific applications
can benefit from the usage of object storage on large scales.Comment: Preprint submitted to WOPSSS workshop at ISC 201
Data centre optimisation enhanced by software defined networking
Contemporary Cloud Computing infrastructures are being challenged by an increasing demand for evolved cloud services characterised by heterogeneous performance requirements including real-time, data-intensive and highly dynamic workloads. The classical way to deal with dynamicity is to scale computing and network resources horizontally. However, these techniques must be coupled effectively with advanced routing and switching in a multi-path environment, mixed with a high degree of flexibility to support dynamic adaptation and live-migration of virtual machines (VMs). We propose a management strategy to jointly optimise computing and networking resources in cloud infrastructures, where Software Defined Networking (SDN) plays a key enabling role
Software-Defined Cloud Computing: Architectural Elements and Open Challenges
The variety of existing cloud services creates a challenge for service
providers to enforce reasonable Software Level Agreements (SLA) stating the
Quality of Service (QoS) and penalties in case QoS is not achieved. To avoid
such penalties at the same time that the infrastructure operates with minimum
energy and resource wastage, constant monitoring and adaptation of the
infrastructure is needed. We refer to Software-Defined Cloud Computing, or
simply Software-Defined Clouds (SDC), as an approach for automating the process
of optimal cloud configuration by extending virtualization concept to all
resources in a data center. An SDC enables easy reconfiguration and adaptation
of physical resources in a cloud infrastructure, to better accommodate the
demand on QoS through a software that can describe and manage various aspects
comprising the cloud environment. In this paper, we present an architecture for
SDCs on data centers with emphasis on mobile cloud applications. We present an
evaluation, showcasing the potential of SDC in two use cases-QoS-aware
bandwidth allocation and bandwidth-aware, energy-efficient VM placement-and
discuss the research challenges and opportunities in this emerging area.Comment: Keynote Paper, 3rd International Conference on Advances in Computing,
Communications and Informatics (ICACCI 2014), September 24-27, 2014, Delhi,
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