With the increasing size and complexity of modern computing systems, a balance between performance and manageability is becoming critical to achieve high performance as well as high productivity computing. Virtual Machine (VM) technology provides various features that help management issues on large-scale computing systems; however, performance concerns have largely blocked the deployment of VM-based computing, especially in the High-Performance Computing (HPC) area.
This dissertation aims at reducing the virtualization overhead and achieving the co-existence of performance and manageability through VM technologies. We focus on I/O virtualization, designing an experimental VM-based computing framework, and addressing performance issues at different levels of the system software stack. We design VMM-bypass I/O, which achieves native I/O performance in VMs by taking advantage of the OS-bypass interconnects. Also with the OS-bypass interconnects, we propose high performance VM migration with Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA), which
drastically reduces the VM management cost. To further improve the communication efficiency on multi-core systems, we design Inter-VM Communication (IVC), a VM-aware communication library to allow efficient shared memory communication among VMs on the same physical host. Finally, we design MVAPICH2-ivc, an MPI library that is aware of VM-based environments and can transparently benefit HPC applications with our proposed designs.
The dissertation concludes that performance should no longer be a barrier to deploying VM-based computing, which enhances productivity by achieving much improved manageability with very little sacrifice in performance.