Title
Improving high-performance computations on clouds through resource underutilization
Abstract
We investigate the effects of shared resources for high-performance computing in a commercial cloud environment where multiple virtual machines share a single hardware node. Although good performance is occasionally obtained, contention degrades the expected performance and introduces significant variance. Using the DGEMM kernel and the HPL benchmark, we show that the underutilization of resources considerably improves expected performance by reducing contention for the CPU and cache space. For instance, for some cluster configurations, the solution is reached almost an order of magnitude earlier on average when the available resources are underutilized. The performance benefits for single node computations are even more impressive: Underutilization improves the expected execution time by two orders of magnitude. Finally, in contrast to unshared clusters, extending underutilized clusters by adding more nodes often improves the execution time due to an increased parallelism even with a slow interconnect. In the best case, by underutilizing the nodes performance was improved enough to entirely offset the cost of an extra node in the cluster.
Year
DOI
Venue
2011
10.1145/1982185.1982217
SAC
Keywords
DocType
Citations 
single hardware node,expected performance,execution time,performance benefit,expected execution time,resource underutilization,improving high-performance computation,single node computation,good performance,cluster configuration,extra node,nodes performance,high performance computing,cloud computing,virtual machine
Conference
9
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.81
4
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Roman Iakymchuk1325.98
Jeff Napper21328.21
Paolo Bientinesi344853.91