Performance Implications of Virtualization and Hyper-Threading on High Energy Physics Applications in a Grid Environment
- 1 January 2005
- proceedings article
- Published by Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
Abstract
The simulations used in the field of high energy physics are compute intensive and exhibit a high level of data parallelism. These features make such simulations ideal candidates for Grid computing. We are taking as an example the GEANT4 detector simulation used for physics studies within the ATLAS experiment at CERN. One key issue in Grid computing is that of network and system security, which can potentially inhibit the wide spread use of such simulations. Virtualization provides a feasible solution because it allows the creation of virtual compute nodes in both local and remote compute clusters, thus providing an insulating layer which can play an important role in satisfying the security concerns of all parties involved. However, it has performance implications. This study provides quantitative estimates of the virtualization and hyper-threading overhead for GEANT on commodity clusters. Results show that virtualization has less than 15% run-time overhead, and that the best run time (with the non-SMP licence of ESX VMware) is achieved by using one virtual machine per CPU. We also observe that hyper-threading does not provide an advantage in this application. Finally, the effect of virtualization on run-time, throughput, mean response time and utilization is estimated using simulations.Keywords
This publication has 6 references indexed in Scilit:
- Executing and visualizing high energy physics simulations with grid technologiesPublished by Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) ,2004
- A case for grid computing on virtual machinesPublished by Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) ,2004
- Performance analysis of scheduling and replication algorithms on Grid Datafarm architecture for high-energy physics applicationsPublished by Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) ,2004
- Hyperthreading technology in the netburst microarchitectureIEEE Micro, 2003
- European DataGrid project: status and plansNuclear Instruments and Methods in Physics Research Section A: Accelerators, Spectrometers, Detectors and Associated Equipment, 2003
- High-energy-physics event generation with Pythia 6.1Computer Physics Communications, 2001