I've had the good fortune to be in the HPC and also HA business for a few years (10 years for HPC but only about 4 for HA). Given the current approach for virtualization I don't see that Xen or other virtualization technologies are good for HPC environments if the performance is a paramount concern.
Virtualization in an HPC/HA world is mostly beneficial for portability and fail-over. But the added layer for a hypervisor will be significant if your jobs run for an extended period of time. I've seen jobs that run for months... a 7% performance penalty (fairly typical in my experience) over the course of a month is significant. --------------------------------- Geoff Galitz Blankenheim NRW, Germany http://www.galitz.org/ http://german-way.com/blog/ _______________________________________________ Beowulf mailing list, [email protected] sponsored by Penguin Computing To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
