System-level virtualization research at Oak Ridge National Laboratory

System-level virtualization is today enjoying a rebirth, after first gaining popularity in the 1970s as a technique to effectively share what were then considered large computing resources to subsequently fade from the spotlight as individual workstations gained in popularity with a “one machine – one user” approach. One reason for this resurgence is that the simple workstation has grown in capability to rival that of anything available in the past. Thus, computing centers are again looking at the price/performance benefit of sharing that single computing box via server consolidation. Hardware and software technology vendors have noticed this renewed interest as well and have responded with a variety of technologies designed to enable advanced virtualization capabilities. However, industry is only concentrating on the benefits of using virtualization for server consolidation (enterprise computing) whereas our interest is in leveraging virtualization to advance high-performance computing (HPC). While these two interests may appear to be orthogonal, one consolidating multiple applications and users on a single machine while the other requires all the power from many machines to be dedicated solely to its purpose, we propose that virtualization does provide attractive capabilities that may be exploited to the benefit of HPC interests. This does raise the two fundamental questions of: is the concept of virtualization (a machine “sharing” technology) really suitable for HPC and if so, how does one go about leveraging these virtualization capabilities for the benefit of HPC. To address these questions, this document presents ongoing studies on the usage of system-level virtualization in a HPC context. These studies include an analysis of the benefits of system-level virtualization for HPC, a presentation of research efforts based on virtualization for system availability, and a presentation of research efforts for the management of virtual systems. The basis for this document was material presented by Stephen L. Scott at the Collaborative and Grid Computing Technologies meeting held in Cancun, Mexico on April 12-14, 2007.