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A Light-Weight Virtual Machine Monitor for Blue Gene/P

Stoess, Jan 1; Steinberg, Udo; Uhlig, Volkmar; Kehne, Jens 1; Appavoo, Jonathan; Waterland, Amos
1 Karlsruher Institut für Technologie (KIT)

Abstract:

In this paper, we present a lightweight, micro-kernel-based virtual machine monitor (VMM) for the Blue Gene/P supercomputer. Our VMM comprises a small µ-kernel with virtualization capabilities and, atop, a user-level VMM component that manages virtual Blue Gene/P cores, memory, and interconnects; we also support running native applications directly atop the µ-kernel. Our design goal is to enable compatibility to standard operating systems such as Linux on BG/P via virtualization, but to also keep the amount of kernel functionality small enough to facilitate shortening the path to applications and lowering operating system noise.

Our prototype implementation successfully virtualizes a Blue Gene/P version of Linux with support for Ethernet-based communication mapped onto Blue Gene/P's collective and torus network devices. Our first experiences and experiments show that our VMM still shows a substantial performance hit, and that support for native application environments is a key requirement towards fully exploiting the capabilities of a supercomputer. Altogether, our approach poses an interesting operating system alternative for supercomputers, providing the convenience of a fully featured commodity software stack, while also promising to deliver the scalability and low latency of an HPC operating system.


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Originalveröffentlichung
DOI: 10.1177/1094342011434815
Scopus
Zitationen: 2
Web of Science
Zitationen: 1
Dimensions
Zitationen: 1
Cover der Publikation
Zugehörige Institution(en) am KIT Fakultät für Informatik – Institut für Betriebs- und Dialogsysteme (IBDS)
Publikationstyp Zeitschriftenaufsatz
Publikationsjahr 2012
Sprache Englisch
Identifikator ISSN: 1078-3482, 1094-3420, 1741-2846
urn:nbn:de:swb:90-291958
KITopen-ID: 1000029195
Erschienen in The international journal of high performance computing applications
Verlag SAGE Publications
Band 26
Heft 2
Seiten 95-109
Bemerkung zur Veröffentlichung Extended version of the ROSS'11 paper with the same title.
Nachgewiesen in Dimensions
Web of Science
Scopus
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