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Resource Management for Running HPC Applications in Container Clouds

  • Stephen Herbein
  • Ayush Dusia
  • Aaron Landwehr
  • Sean McDaniel
  • Jose Monsalve
  • Yang Yang
  • Seetharami R. Seelam
  • Michela TauferEmail author
Conference paper
First Online:
Part of the Lecture Notes in Computer Science book series (LNCS, volume 9697)

Abstract

Innovations in operating-system-level virtualization technologies such as resource control groups, isolated namespaces, and layered file systems have driven a new breed of virtualization solutions called containers. Applications running in containers depend on the host operating system (OS) for resource allocation, throttling, and prioritization. However, the OS is designed to provide only best-effort/fair-share resource allocation. Lack of resource management, as in virtual machine managers, constrains the use of containers and container-based clusters to a subset of workloads other than traditional high-performance computing (HPC) workflows. In this paper, we describe problems with the fair-share resource management of CPUs, network bandwidth, and I/O bandwidth on HPC workloads and present mechanisms to allocate, throttle, and prioritize each of these three critical resources in containerized HPC environments. These mechanisms enable container-based HPC clusters to host applications with different resource requirements and enforce effective resource use so that a large collection of HPC applications can benefit from the flexibility, portability, and agile characteristics of containers.

Keywords

Virtual Machine Network Throughput Congestion Window Context Switching Multiple Container 
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
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Notes

Acknowledgment

This work is supported by NSF grant #312259 and #312236. We also thank IBM for providing access to their Softlayer (http://www.softlayer.com) and Supervessel (https://ptopenlab.com) cloud platforms and for providing guidance on container technologies. Our code can be found on GitHub at [12, 15, 20, 22].

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Copyright information

© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016

Authors and Affiliations

  • Stephen Herbein
    • 1
  • Ayush Dusia
    • 1
  • Aaron Landwehr
    • 1
  • Sean McDaniel
    • 1
  • Jose Monsalve
    • 1
  • Yang Yang
    • 1
  • Seetharami R. Seelam
    • 2
  • Michela Taufer
    • 1
    Email author
  1. 1.University of DelawareNewarkUSA
  2. 2.IBM T. J. Watson Research CenterYorktown HeightsUSA

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