Beowulf clusters are popular in the field of high performance computing (HPC). Customized operating systems have been used to achieve speedup in HPC by providing specific mechanisms to support the application and by eliminating OS jitter. Virtualized operating systems make it possible to run customized operating systems in a shared environment. The principle draw back to virtualized operating systems for HPC is the added I/O latency of virtualization.
Para-virtualized I/O when coupled with a lightweight protocol. Can serve to reduce and in many cases eliminate the latency gap between native network I/O and virtualized network I/O. This study finds the latency performance of para-virtualized Infiniband over Ethernet matches or exceeds the performance of TCP/IP native for messages over 128 bytes.