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Opportunities for leveraging OS virtualization in high-end supercomputing.

Conference ·
OSTI ID:1035313
This paper examines potential motivations for incorporating virtualization support in the system software stacks of high-end capability supercomputers. We advocate that this will increase the flexibility of these platforms significantly and enable new capabilities that are not possible with current fixed software stacks. Our results indicate that compute, virtual memory, and I/O virtualization overheads are low and can be further mitigated by utilizing well-known techniques such as large paging and VMM bypass. Furthermore, since the addition of virtualization support does not affect the performance of applications using the traditional native environment, there is essentially no disadvantage to its addition.
Research Organization:
Sandia National Laboratories
Sponsoring Organization:
USDOE
DOE Contract Number:
AC04-94AL85000
OSTI ID:
1035313
Report Number(s):
SAND2010-8287C
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English