Performance Analysis of LXC for HPC Environments

Despite of Cloud infrastructures can be used as High Performance Computing (HPC) platforms, many issues from virtualization overhead have kept them almost unrelated. However, with advent of container-based virtualizers, this scenario acquires new perspectives because this technique promises to decrease the virtualization overhead, achieving a near-native performance. In this work, we analyze the performance of a container-based virtualization solution -Linux Container (LXC) - against a hypervisor-based virtualization solution - KVM - under HPC activities. For our experiments, we consider CPU and (network and inter-process) communication performance, and results show the hypervisor type can impact distinctly in performance according to resource used by application.