User Managed Virtual Clusters in Comet
Rick Wagner, Philip M. Papadopoulos, Dmitry Mishin, Trevor Cooper, Mahidhar Tatineti, Gregor von Laszewski, Fugang Wang, Geoffrey Fox · 2016
Hardware virtualization has been gaining a significant share of computing time in the last years. Using virtual machines (VMs) for parallel computing is an attractive option for many users. A VM gives users a freedom of choosing an operating system, software stack and security policies, leaving the physical hardware, OS management, and billing to physical cluster administrators. The well-known solutions for cloud computing, both commercial (Amazon Cloud, Google Cloud, Yahoo Cloud, etc.) and open-source (OpenStack, Eucalyptus) provide platforms for running a single VM or a group of VMs. With all the benefits, there are also some drawbacks, which include reduced performance when running code inside of a VM, increased complexity of cluster management, as well as the need to learn new tools and protocols to manage the clusters.