Exploring the Use of Virtual Machines and Virtual Clusters for High Performance Computing Education.
Thomas J. Hacker · 2020
High performance computing systems have been based on commodity computing hardware since the introduction of Beowulf systems in the mid-1990's.The emergence of virtualization and cloud computing technologies now make it possible to build high performance computing cluster systems across a collection of virtual machines.This paper will explore the pedagogical and technological issues involved in the use of virtualization and cloud computing technologies for HPC education, focusing on: mixed use of physical and virtual computing environments; high performance networking fabrics; pedagogical limitations of virtual and cloud computing; the development of an effective teaching laboratory for virtual clustering; and the performance and reliability constraints of a mixed virtual cluster environment.The paper will describe the use of virtualization software, specifically Xen, OpenVZ, and VMware, and an assessment of the viability of the Eucalyptus, NIMBUS, and OpenNebula cloud computing systems for use for virtual clusters for HPC education.