vTorque: Introducing Virtualization Capabilities to Torque

Abstract

The flexibility and portability commonly known from Clouds provide many benefits to users, software developers, administrators and data-center owners. With emerging technologies addressing today’s major bottleneck of virtualization technologies, the virtual I/O, incentives for adoption of virtualization in HPC infrastructures arise. The advantages are manyfold for virtualization in HPC. Users can be served with flexible customized environments. Software developers can package applications with best matching dependencies. Administrators can upgrade or change their HPC infrastructure, i.e. the operating system, without impact on the applications served. Data-center owners can serve conflicting user groups and increase overall resource utilization by consolidating workloads with opposite characteristics. vTorque is an non-intrusive approach to introduce virtualization capabilities to the PBS based batch-system resource manager Torque. For traditional HPC infrastructures it enables cloud-like features, e.g. flexibility and portability, while maintaining the ability to run jobs on bare metal. vTorque further integrates available optimizations for virtual I/O throughout the whole stack, from the hypervisor to the guest level, as optional components.