NASA Case Study

For more information about the Nebula project
and service, visit http://nebula.nasa.gov
For more information about the NASA Center for Climate
Simulation, visit http://www.nccs.nasa.gov
For more information about Intel® Ethernet, visit
www.intel.com/go/ethernet
0 10,000 20,000 30,000 40,000 50,000 60,000
90%
80%
70%
60%
50%
40%
30%
20%
10%
0%
% of Peak Performance
Problem Size (N)
(Higher is better)
0
40
000
50
000
60
000
VM to VM (with SR-IOV)
Bare Metal to Bare Metal
VM to VM (with virtualized
I/O but without SR-IOV)
Intel® MKL LINPACK
Figure 2. Virtualized and non-virtualized performance results for Intel® MKL LINPACK.
(although in the same realm as) the bare-
metal case. This result indicates that there
are some cases where bare-metal (non-
virtualized) implementations will continue
to outperform virtualized ones. Therefore,
while virtualized environments are viable
for some high-performance workloads, the
performance and latency requirements of
individual applications must be considered.
Conclusions
The core conclusion from this testing
is that cloud-based high-performance
computing is a viable possibility. SR-IOV,
as supported by Intel Ethernet Server
Adapters, is a core enabling technology
that helps overcome performance
limitations associated with virtualization.
In terms of both throughput and latency
test results using the Ohio State
University MPI Benchmark, virtualized
performance actually exceeded that of
the bare metal (non-virtualized) case.
While in testing with the Intel MKL
LINPACK implementation, bare-metal
servers out-performed virtualized
ones, the benet delivered by SR-IOV
nevertheless demonstrates the potential
for virtualized usage models. Because of
the exibility and scalability afforded by
virtualization (including the cloud), these
results merit further consideration.
Future Work
To advance the state of this preliminary
testing, additional work is needed.
In particular, the team wants to test
additional benchmarks and real-world
applications, as well as extending the
tests to include InniBand fabric and
cloud infrastructures such as OpenStack
and Eucalyptus*. Future testing will also
include additional hypervisors, such as
Xen* and other VM OSs, such as Red Hat
Enterprise Linux and SUSE Linux.
As NASA continues to rene its cloud-
based infrastructure as a service, it
expects to realize more benets in the
areas of simplication, exibility, and
cost-effectiveness. Looking ahead, the
agency’s high-performance computing
workloads have begun the process of
shifting to open infrastructures that use
Ethernet fabric, and further acceleration
seems inevitable.
SOLUTION PROVIDED BY:
1
http://software.intel.com/sites/oss/project/openstack.php.
2
Nuttcp-7.1.5.c (gcc compiler): http://lcp.nrl.navy.mil/nuttcp.
3
MVAPICH2 1.7rc1 (Intel
®
compiler): http://mvapich.cse.ohio-state.edu/.
4
Intel
®
MKL 10.2.6 (Intel compiler): http://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/intel-math-kernel-library-linpack-download/.
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