SR-IOV: The Key to Fully Virtualized HPC Clusters

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In this video from the Mellanox booth at SC13, Glenn Lockwood from SDSC presents: SR-IOV The Key Enabling Technology for Fully Virtualized HPC Clusters.

SR-IOV’s overhead is small but finite.  SDSC has chosen to go with it for the deployment of Comet because of Comet’s need to serve an extremely diverse range of user communities, web-based gateways, and other projects that require sophisticated software stacks that would be too difficult to maintain on bare metal.  In that context, losing 15% of peak performance is a fair trade if it makes a project or compute service tractable.  Thus, I think the bottom line is that SR-IOV represents a major step forward in the pursuit of high-performance virtualized high-performance computing.  It’s not the end of the line, but it does open a lot of new doors.

Comments

  1. Sharan Kalwani says

    Glen knows a lot about IO. Been following him for a while now.