Title: Enhancing HPC Systems using Virtualization

Speaker: Patrick Bridges, University of New Mexico

Date/Time: Monday, April 12, 1:00pm        

Location: CSRI Building/Room 95 (Sandia NM)

Brief Abstract: Virtualization has long been used in enterprise computing systems but has only recently found its way into large-scale HPC systems with addition of hardware virtualization support to commodity processor architectures. These surprising power of these features provides a wide range of opportunities to improve the performance and scalability of HPC system software. In this talk, I discuss the basics of hardware-based system virtualization and a number of ways it can be used to address important problems in developing exascale HPC systems. I begin by discussing our initial work in the area, a collaboration between UNM, Northwestern University, and Sandia that has led to an HPC-friendly virtual machine monitor that has the opportunity to dramatically improve testbed availability for research in future HPC system software, programming models, and architectures. Following this, I discuss how more non-traditional use of virtualization capabilities can potentially be used to improve the scalability of commodity-based operating systems on extreme-scale HPC system. In particular, I discuss how virtualization hardware can be used to transparently mitigate noise when running commodity-based operating systems at scale, and how it can also potentially be used to optimize memory management in operating systems for HPC systems in ways that will improve memory system and communication performance. Finally, I discuss other potential related research directions and a plan for conducting the research described in this talk.

CSRI POC: Ron Brightwell, (505) 844-2099