In this presentation Matt Herreras and Josh Simons describe how Hybrid Cloud powered by virtualization offers increased scientific agility for HPC workloads. Make no mistake; virtualization is coming to HPC in a Big Way, and everyone will benefit. Learn more: http://cto.vmware.com/author/joshsimons/ Watch the video presentation: http://wp.me/p3RLHQ-baU

1. Hybrid Cloud for Increased
Scientific Agility
Matt Herreras
Systems Engineering
Josh Simons
Office of the CTO
© 2014 VMware Inc. All rights reserved.

2. Our Goal
Increase agility and decrease time to solution
for scientists and engineers using
virtualization and cloud technologies
2

3. Problem Statements
• Fundamental tension between end-users and administrators
– End-user need for compute environments customized and optimized for
their specific requirements
– Administrator need to deploy a secure, cost-effective, standard compute
infrastructure
• Which leads to
– Disconnected islands of compute with security risk and cost
inefficiencies
• Current HPC job scheduling approaches are not agile
– Job queuing delays can increase time to solution
– May overcommit physical resources on cluster nodes
• Which leads to
– Reduced cluster throughput and inherent inefficiencies
3

4. How Cloud and Virtualization Can Help
• Use virtualized HPC cloud infrastructure to simultaneously support the
needs of both scientist / engineers and administrators
• Leverage inherent virtual platform capabilities to increase cluster
throughput and increase efficiency
• Enable rapid end-user self-provisioning of new compute resources
• Provide policy-based enforcement of fair-share resource usage in
multi-tenant environments
• Automate secure, compliant policy-based workload separation
• Add fault recovery and avoidance capabilities to protect applications
from hardware failure, and to increase cluster throughput
4

5. End-User Customization
Support groups with disparate software requirements
Including root access
App A
App B
OS A
OS B
virtualizationOS
Standard layer
virtualizationOS
Standard layer
virtualizationOS
Standard layer
hardware
hardware
hardware

6. Workload Separation
Secure multi-tenancy
Fault isolation
…and sometimes performance
App A
App B
OS A
OS B
virtualization layer
virtualization layer
virtualization layer
hardware
hardware
hardware

7. Virtual Machine Live Migration

8. Use Resources More Efficiently
Avoid killing or pausing jobs
App C
Increase overall throughput
OS A
App A
OS A
App B
App D
OS B
OS A
OS
OS
virtualization layer
hardware
virtualization layer
hardware
App E
OS
OS B
virtualization layer
hardware

9. Workload Agility
app
app
app
OS
app
app
OS
OS
OS
app
operating system
virtualization layer
virtualization layer
hardware
hardware
hardware

10. Secure Private and Public Cloud for HPC
Research Group 1
Research Group m
Users
IT
Public Clouds
VMware vCloud Automation Center
User Portals
Blueprints
Security
VMware vCAC API
Research Cluster 1
Research Cluster n
VMware
vShield
Programmatic
Control and
Integrations
VMware
vCenter Server
VMware
vCenter Server
VMware
vCenter Server
VMware vSphere
VMware vSphere
VMware vSphere

11. Summary
• New approach to delivering HPC resources using cloud and
virtualization technologies that can uniquely address the conflicting
needs of end-users and administrators
• Move away from traditional static job placement to a more
flexible, dynamic environment to raise throughput and increase
scientific agility
• VMware continues to drive virtualization platform improvements to
address an expanding range of HPC workloads
• Just a taste offered here. See papers and blog listed in Resources for
detailed information on workload performance, platform tuning, etc.
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12. Resources
• CTO HPC blog:
– http://cto.vmware.com/tag/hpc
• ACM Operating Systems Review paper:
– Virtualizing High Performance Computing
• HPCvirt 2011 workshop papers:
– Performance Evaluation of HPC Benchmarks on VMware's ESX Server
• http://labs.vmware.com/publications/performance-evaluation-of-hpc-benchmarks-on-vmwares-
esxi-server
– Virtualizing Performance Counters
• http://labs.vmware.com/publications/virtualizing-performance-counters
• Latency whitepaper:
– Best Practices for Performance Tuning of Latency-Sensitive Workloads in
vSphere VMs
• http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/techpaper/VMW-Tuning-Latency-Sensitive-Workloads.pdf

13. Resources
• Big Data / Hadoop technical whitepaper
– Virtualized Hadoop Performance with VMware vSphere 5.1
• http://www.vmware.com/resources/techresources/10360
• InfiniBand performance
– RDMA Performance in Virtual Machines with QDR InfiniBand on vSphere 5
• http://labs.vmware.com/publications/ib-researchnote-apr2012
• Paravirtualized RMDA
– Toward a Paravirtual RDMA Device for VMware ESXi Guests
• http://labs.vmware.com/publications/vrdma-vmtj-winter2012

14. Thank You
Matt Herreras
mherreras@vmware.com
Josh Simons
simons@vmware.com