Nosv: A lightweight nested-virtualization VMM for hosting high performance computing on cloud

•nOSV can provide a bare-metal like performance for HPC applications on Cloud.•The CPU cores and main memory are not shared among guest VMs of nOSV.•Dedicated I/O resources are allocated to I/O sensitive HPC guests.•Other virtualization environments can run on nOSV to host commodity applications.

Moving the high performance computing (HPC) to Cloud not only reduces the costs but also gives users the ability to customize their system. Besides, compared with the traditional HPC computing environments, such as grid and cluster which run HPC applications on bare-metal, cloud equipped with virtualization not only improves resource utilization but also reduces maintenance cost. While for some reasons, current virtualization-based cloud has limited performance for HPC. Such performance overhead could be caused by Virtual Machine Monitor (VMM) interceptions, virtualized I/O devices or cross Virtual Machine (VM) interference, etc. In order to guarantee the performance of HPC applications on Cloud, the VMM should interfere guest VMs as less as possible and allocate dedicated resources such as CPU cores, DRAM and devices to guest VMs running HPC applications.In this paper, we propose a novel cloud infrastructure to serve the HPC applications and normal applications concurrently. This novel infrastructure is based on a lightweight high performance VMM named nOSV. For HPC applications, nOSV constructs a strong isolated high performance guest VM with dedicated resources. At runtime, the high performance VM manages all resources by itself and is not interfered by nOSV. By supporting nested virtualization, nOSV can run HPC with commodity application and keep the flexibility of traditional Cloud. nOSV runs other virtualization environments, like Xen and Docker, as high performance guest VMs. All commodity Cloud applications are hosted in these virtualization environments and share hardware resources with each other. The prototype of nOSV shows that it provides a bare-metal like performance for HPC applications and has about 23% improvement compared to HPC applications running on Xen.