2006-08: Virtualized System Environments for Petascale Computing and Beyond

This research project addresses scalability, manageability, and ease-of-use challenges in petascale system software and application runtime environments through the development of a virtual system environment (VSE). In addition to providing a scalable and reliable sandbox environment for scientific application development on desktops and clusters, the VSE will offer an identical production environment for scientific application deployment on terascale and petascale high-end computing (HEC) systems. The VSE concept enables plug-and-play supercomputing through desktop-to-cluster-to-petaflop computer system-level virtualization based on recent advances in hypervisor virtualization technologies. The overall goal of this effort is to advance the race for scientific discovery through computation by enabling day-one operation capability of newly installed systems and by improving productivity of scientific application development and deployment.

Funding Sources

• Laboratory Directed Research and Development, Oak Ridge National Laboratory

Participating Institutions

• Oak Ridge National Laboratory
• University of New Mexico
• Northwestern University

Peer-reviewed Journal Publications

1. Stephen L. Scott, Geoffroy R. Vallée, Thomas Naughton, Anand Tikotekar, Christian Engelmann, and Hong H. Ong. System-Level Virtualization Research at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Future Generation Computer Systems (FGCS), volume 26, number 3, pages 304-307, March 1, 2010. Elsevier B.V, Amsterdam, The Netherlands. ISSN 0167-739X. DOI 10.1016/j.future.2009.07.001.

Peer-reviewed Conference Publications

1. Geoffroy R. Vallée, Thomas Naughton, Christian Engelmann, Hong H. Ong, and Stephen L. Scott. System-level Virtualization for High Performance Computing. In Proceedings of the 16th Euromicro International Conference on Parallel, Distributed, and network-based Processing (PDP) 2008, pages 636-643, Toulouse, France, February 13-15, 2008. IEEE Computer Society, Los Alamitos, CA, USA. ISBN 978-0-7695-3089-5. DOI 10.1109/PDP.2008.85. Acceptance rate 40% (83/207).

Peer-reviewed Workshop Publications

1. Anand Tikotekar, Hong H. Ong, Sadaf Alam, Geoffroy R. Vallée, Thomas Naughton, Christian Engelmann, and Stephen L. Scott. Performance Comparison of Two Virtual Machine Scenarios Using an HPC Application – A Case study Using Molecular Dynamics Simulations. In Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on System-level Virtualization for High Performance Computing (HPCVirt) 2009, in conjunction with the 4th ACM SIGOPS European Conference on Computer Systems (EuroSys) 2009, pages 33-40, Nuremberg, Germany, March 30, 2009. ACM Press, New York, NY, USA. ISBN 978-1-60558-465-2. DOI 10.1145/1519138.1519143.
2. Geoffroy R. Vallée, Thomas Naughton, Hong H. Ong, Anand Tikotekar, Christian Engelmann, Wesley Bland, Ferrol Aderholt, and Stephen L. Scott. Virtual System Environments. In Communications in Computer and Information Science: Proceedings of the 2nd DMTF Academic Alliance Workshop on Systems and Virtualization Management: Standards and New Technologies (SVM) 2008, pages 72-83, Munich, Germany, October 21-22, 2008. Springer Verlag, Berlin, Germany. ISBN 978-3-540-88707-2. ISSN 1865-0929. DOI 10.1007/978-3-540-88708-9_7.
3. Anand Tikotekar, Geoffroy Vallée, Thomas Naughton, Hong H. Ong, Christian Engelmann, and Stephen L. Scott. An Analysis of HPC Benchmark Applications in Virtual Machine Environments. In Lecture Notes in Computer Science: Proceedings of the 14th European Conference on Parallel and Distributed Computing (Euro-Par) 2008: 3rd Workshop on Virtualization in High-Performance Cluster and Grid Computing (VHPC) 2008, pages 63-71, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain, August 26-29, 2008. Springer Verlag, Berlin, Germany. ISBN 978-3-642-00954-9. DOI 10.1007/978-3-642-00955-6.
4. Anand Tikotekar, Geoffroy Vallée, Thomas Naughton, Hong H. Ong, Christian Engelmann, Stephen L. Scott, and Anthony M. Filippi. Effects of Virtualization on a Scientific Application – Running a Hyperspectral Radiative Transfer Code on Virtual Machines. In Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on System-level Virtualization for High Performance Computing (HPCVirt) 2008, in conjunction with the 3rd ACM SIGOPS European Conference on Computer Systems (EuroSys) 2008, pages 16-23, Glasgow, UK, March 31, 2008. ACM Press, New York, NY, USA. ISBN 978-1-60558-120-0. DOI 10.1145/1435452.1435455.
5. Christian Engelmann, Stephen L. Scott, Hong H. Ong, Geoffroy R. Vallée, and Thomas Naughton. Configurable Virtualized System Environments for High Performance Computing. In Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on System-level Virtualization for High Performance Computing (HPCVirt) 2007, in conjunction with the 2nd ACM SIGOPS European Conference on Computer Systems (EuroSys) 2007, Lisbon, Portugal, March 20, 2007.

Peer-reviewed Conference Posters

1. Stephen L. Scott, Geoffroy R. Vallée, Thomas Naughton, Anand Tikotekar, Christian Engelmann, and Hong H. Ong. System-level Virtualization for for High-Performance Computing. Poster at the National HPC Workshop on Resilience 2009, Arlington, VA, USA, August 12-14, 2009.
2. Stephen L. Scott, Geoffroy R. Vallée, Thomas Naughton, Anand Tikotekar, Christian Engelmann, and Hong H. Ong. System-level Virtualization for for High-Performance Computing. Poster at the 1st High-Performance Computer Science Week (HPCSW) 2008, Denver, CO, USA, March 30 – April 5, 2008.

Talks and Lectures

1. Christian Engelmann. High-Performance Computing Research at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Invited talk at the Reading Annual Computational Science Workshop, Reading, United Kingdom, December 8, 2008.
2. Christian Engelmann. Operating System Research at ORNL: System-level Virtualization. Seminar at the Institute of Graphics and Parallel Processing, Johannes Kepler University, Linz, Austria, April 10, 2007.

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