Performance Improvement of Hypervisors for HPC Workload

The virtualization technology has many excellent features beneficial for today’s high-performance computing (HPC). It enables more flexible and effective utilization of the computing resources. However, a major barrier for its wide acceptance in HPC domain lies in the relative large performance loss for workloads. Of the major performance-influencing factors, memory management subsystem for virtual machines is a potential source of performance loss. Many efforts have been invested in seeking the solutions to reduce the performance overhead in guest memory address translation process. This work contributes two novel solutions - „DPMS” and “STDP”. Both of them are presented conceptually and implemented partially for a hypervisor - KVM. The benchmark results for DPMS show that the performance for a number of workloads that are sensitive to paging methods can be more or less improved through the adoption of this solution. STDP illustrates that it is feasible to reduce the performance overhead in the second dimension paging for those workloads that cannot make good use of the TLB.