On the Use of Containers in High Performance Computing

The lightweight, portable, and flexible nature of containers is driving their widespread adoption in cloud solutions. Data analysis and deep learning applications have especially benefited from containerized solutions. As such data analysis is also being utilized in the high performance computing (HPC) domain, the need for container support in HPC has become paramount. However, container adoption in HPC face crucial performance and I/O challenges. One obstacle is that while there have been container solutions for HPC, such solutions have not been thoroughly investigated, especially from the aspect of their impact on the crucial I/O throughput needs of HPC. To this end, this paper provides a first-of-its-kind empirical analysis of state-of-the-art representative container solutions (Docker, Podman, Singularity, and Charliecloud) in HPC environments, especially how containers interact with the HPC storage systems. We present the design of an analysis framework that is deployed on all nodes in an HPC environment, and captures aspects such as CPU, memory, network, and file I/O statistics from the nodes and the storage system. We are able to garner key insights from our analysis, e.g., Charliecloud outperforms other container solutions in terms of container start-up time, while Singularity and Charliecloud are equivalent in I/O throughput. But this comes at a cost, as Charliecloud invokes the most metadata and I/O operations on the underlying Lustre file system. By identifying such optimization opportunities, we can enhance performance of containers atop HPC and help the aforementioned applications.

Name thesis:degree_name

Master of Science

Level thesis:degree_level

masters

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Computer Science and Applications

Department dc:contributor.department

Computer Science

Grantor dc:publisher

Virginia Tech

Year dc:date.issued

2020

Author dc:creator

• Abraham, Subil

Chair dc:contributor.committeechair

• Butt, Ali R.

Committee members dc:contributor.committeemember

• Viswanath, Bimal
• Williams, Ryan K.

• Container Performance
• High Performance Computing
• Parallel File Systems
• HPC Storage and I/O

Statement dc:rights

• In Copyright

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/

Dc Identifier Other

vt_gsexam:26761

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:vtechworks.lib.vt.edu:10919/99319