The Role of Lightweight Virtualization in HPC Systems

Session Chair

Barney Maccabe (Oak Ridge National Laboratory, USA)

Abstract

Virtualization has become a common feature in almost every computing environment from personal computers to cloud environments. 
This session will focus on how virtualization might be useful in a capability based HPC environment.  One of the key advantages that virtualization is the ability to provide an application specific software stack.  New hardware features make it possible to change out the entire stack, including privileged software, with minimal impact on performance.  This is particularly important as we consider the convergence of simulation science and data science, where different types of applications are likely to require very different software stacks. 

The Hobbes research project has been exploring lightweight virtualization mechanisms that, in addition to supporting a wide range of software stacks, support the composition of applications that use different software stacks.  In contrast, the Shifter project has been exploring ways to provide container technology in production HPC environments. 
An important goal of this session is to understand how the research results attained in the Hobbes project might be transitioned into the kind of production environment that Shifter is addressing more directly.

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