Virtualization and Power Optimization of Embedded HPC Applications in AMPERE
On the 25 May 2023, the AMPERE project sponsored the 18th Workshop on Virtualization in High-Performance Cloud Computing. This Workshop was held in conjunction with the ISC 2023 High Performance Computing Conference in Hamburg.
The Workshop on Virtualization in High-Performance Cloud Computing (VHPC) brought together researchers and industrial practitioners facing the challenges posed by virtualization in HPC/Cloud scenarios. Discussion, collaboration, mutual exchange of knowledge and experience were the goal of this workshop to enable research to ultimately provide novel solutions for virtualized computing systems of tomorrow. The workshop focused on how containers and virtualization technologies constitute key enabling factors for flexible resource management in modern data centers, and particularly in cloud environments. Cloud providers need to manage complex infrastructures in a seamless fashion to support the highly dynamic and heterogeneous workloads and hosted applications customers deploy. Similarly, HPC environments have been increasingly adopting techniques that enable flexible management of vast computing and networking resources, close to marginal provisioning cost, which is unprecedented in the history of scientific and commercial computing.
Various virtualization-containerization technologies contribute to the overall picture in different ways: machine virtualization, with its capability to enable consolidation of multiple underutilized servers with heterogeneous software and operating systems (OSes), and its capability to live-migrate a fully operating virtual machine (VM) with a very short downtime, enables novel and dynamic ways to manage physical servers; OS-level virtualization (i.e., containerization), with its capability to isolate multiple user-space environments and to allow for their coexistence within the same OS kernel, promises to provide many of the advantages of machine virtualization with high levels of responsiveness and performance; lastly, unikernels provide for many virtualization benefits with a minimized OS/library surface. I/O virtualization, in turn, allows physical network interfaces to exchange traffic with multiple VMs or containers; network virtualization, with its capability to create logical network overlays independently from the underlying physical topology, is another fundamental enabling technology for Cloud/HPC infrastructures. Last, storage virtualization needs to evolve to support increasingly demanding requirements in terms of performance and reliability for the managed application data.
Keynote speaker, Paul E. McKenney, Software Engineer at Meta gave a talk on “What is RCU and How Does it Help the Linux Kernel Scale?".
Workshop co-chair, and AMPERE partner Tommaso Cucinotta from Sculoa Superiore de Santa'Anna deliverd an invited talk on " Virtualization and Power Optimization of Embedded HPC Applications in AMPERE ". The slides can be found here.
