[Beowulf] VMC - Virtual Machine Console

[Meng Kuan]

On Jan 16, 2008 9:19 PM, Douglas Eadline <deadline at eadline.org> wrote:
> While your project looks interesting and I like the idea of
> VMs, however I have not seen a good answer to the fact that VM = layers
> and in HPC layers = latency. Any thoughts? Also, is it open source?

We performed some benchmark testing with linpack and bonnie++ on the
VM and on the physical host. For para-virtualized VMs, the linpack
performance is on par with the physical host. However, for bonnie++
tests, para-virtualized VMs fell way behind physical host's
performance. In short, CPU-bound and memory intensive HPC apps should
do ok but not IO-intensive apps. More testing and fine-tuning will
probably be needed to see how far we can push the VM in terms of
IO-intensive operations but we are hoping that in time to come
virtualization technologies will be able to narrow that gap.

And yes, the VMC application is open source. You can find the download
links in the VMC Install document.

Regards,
Meng Kuan