VM and performance (was Re: [Beowulf] best Linux distribution)

[Tim Cutts]

On 9 Oct 2007, at 3:48 pm, andrew holway wrote:

> Seems to be some excitement in Europe over Xen, a  
> paravirtualisation package.

I ran our bioinformatics benchmark suite on some of our old RLX  
blades running Xen, just to see what the performance hit was.  It was  
only about 2%, running a mixture of BLAST, HMMER, genewise and  
exonerate, many of which are fairly I/O intensive.  I was quite  
surprised it was as small a hit as that.

That said, I'm still not using virtualisation on our production  
clusters.

Tim


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