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Published in: The Journal of Supercomputing 6/2021

30-11-2020

Performance comparison of multi-container deployment schemes for HPC workloads: an empirical study

Authors: Peini Liu, Jordi Guitart

Published in: The Journal of Supercomputing | Issue 6/2021

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Abstract

The high-performance computing (HPC) community has recently started to use containerization to obtain fast, customized, portable, flexible, and reproducible deployments of their workloads. Previous work showed that deploying an HPC workload into a single container can keep bare-metal performance. However, there is a lack of research on multi-container deployments that partition the processes belonging to each application into different containers. Partitioning HPC applications has shown to improve their performance on virtual machines by allowing to set affinity to a non-uniform memory access (NUMA) domain for each of them. Consequently, it is essential to understand the performance implications of distinct multi-container deployment schemes for HPC workloads, focusing on the impact of the container granularity and its combination with processor and memory affinity. This paper presents a systematic performance comparison and analysis of multi-container deployment schemes for HPC workloads on a single-node platform, which considers different containerization technologies (including Docker and Singularity), two different platform architectures (UMA and NUMA), and two application subscription modes (exact subscription and over-subscription). Our results indicate that finer-grained multi-container deployments, on the one side, can benefit the performance of some applications with low interprocess communication, especially in over-subscribed scenarios and when combined with affinity, but, on the other side, they can incur some performance degradation for communication-intensive applications when using containerization technologies that deploy isolated network namespaces.

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Metadata
Title
Performance comparison of multi-container deployment schemes for HPC workloads: an empirical study
Authors
Peini Liu
Jordi Guitart
Publication date
30-11-2020
Publisher
Springer US
Published in
The Journal of Supercomputing / Issue 6/2021
Print ISSN: 0920-8542
Electronic ISSN: 1573-0484
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11227-020-03518-1

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