HPC Container Runtimes have Minimal or No Performance Impact
HPC Container Runtimes have Minimal or No Performance Impact
复制标题
HPC 容器运行时对性能的影响很小或没有
DOI：
10.1109/canopie-hpc49598.2019.00010
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发表时间：
2019
期刊：
影响因子：
--
通讯作者：
R. Priedhorsky
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
Alfred Torrez;Timothy Randles;R. Priedhorsky
高性能计算中心面临着越来越多的需求，即需要更大的软件灵活性来支持计算科学工作中更快、更多样化的创新。容器使用Linux内核功能来允许用户用自己的软件堆栈替换安装在主机上的软件堆栈，它是提供这种灵活性的一种日益流行的方法。由于Docker等标准容器技术不适用于HPC，因此出现了三种特定于HPC的技术：Charliecout、Shifter和Singulity。一个常见的问题是，容器可能会带来性能开销。据我们所知，以前还没有对集装箱性能进行全面、严格、以HPC为重点的评估。我们目前的实验使用行业标准基准(SysBtch、STREAM和HPCG)在多个维度上比较了所有三种HPC容器实现和裸机的性能。我们发现这四种环境之间没有显著的性能差异，可能的例外是内存使用略有不同。这些结果表明，无论使用哪种容器技术，HPC用户都可以放心地将其应用程序容器化，而不必担心性能下降。这是一个令人鼓舞的发展，朝着更多地采用用户定义的软件堆栈，以增加高性能计算系统的灵活性。
HPC centers are facing increasing demand for greater software flexibility to support faster and more diverse innovation in computational scientific work. Containers, which use Linux kernel features to allow a user to substitute their own software stack for that installed on the host, are an increasingly popular method to provide this flexibility. Because standard container technologies such as Docker are unsuitable for HPC, three HPC-specific technologies have emerged: Charliecloud, Shifter, and Singularity. A common concern is that containers may introduce performance overhead. To our knowledge, no comprehensive, rigorous, HPC-focused assessment of container performance has previously been performed. Our present experiment compares the performance of all three HPC container implementations and bare metal on multiple dimensions using industry-standard benchmarks (SysBench, STREAM, and HPCG). We found no meaningful performance differences between the four environments, with the possible exception of modest variation in memory usage. These results suggest that HPC users should feel free to containerize their applications without concern about performance degradation, regardless of the container technology used. It is an encouraging development towards greater adoption of user-defined software stacks to increase the flexibility of HPC systems.