[Beowulf] VMC - Virtual Machine Console

[Meng Kuan]

On Jan 17, 2008 1:09 AM, Joe Landman <landman at scalableinformatics.com> wrote:
> That said, and the point of this is that many HPC apps are rapidly
> becoming IO bound, as they need to move ginormous (meaning really large)
> amounts of data to and from disk, and MPI codes usually need to move
> data at the lowest latency possible.
>
> There VMs which negatively impact IO performance (bandwidth/latency)
> will be problematic.
>
> What would be interesting is a VM OS bypass for IO.  VM talk directly to
> hardware.   Not sure it is possible though, unless you are using a
> hypervisor, and a thin VM (OpenVZ?).

I believe Xen is working towards that. For instance, their latest
release (Xen 3.2.0) has:

  - Preliminary PCI pass-through support (using appropriate Intel or AMD
I/O-virtualisation hardware)

I have read on the Xen lists that some folks have successfully
increased network performance this way.

OpenVZ is a possibility and it definitely is "thinner" than Xen in
this aspect. This is why we are using the libvirt library which is
starting to include support for containers like OpenVZ.

>
> Just some thoughts, hopefully not all that flammable  (Jeff, what is
> that rule?  I am being asked, and I don't have an answer ...)

Not at all. In fact, its great to hear and learn from you guys. Thanks!

Regards,
Meng Kuan