Performance of Software-based Encrypted MPI Communication over Container Clusters
Mohsen Gavahi, Abu Naser, Mehran Sadeghi Lahijani, Cong Wu, Zhi Wang, Xin Yuan · 2023
We study the performance of software-based secure communication infrastructure for HPC Message Passing Interface (MPI) applications in container clusters. Specifically, extensive experiments are performed using micro-and application benchmarks to evaluate the encrypted MPI communication performance. Container built-in encrypted communication schemes including Docker Swarm and Kubernetes Antrea and Calico, as well as CryptMPI, a secure MPI library, are evaluated and compared. Our results confirm the findings in earlier studies that for some MPI applications, running in the container environment with unencrypted communication introduces only minor overheads over running on the bare metal system. However, when the communications are encrypted, all of the container built-in software-based encrypted communication mechanisms that we evaluated incur very large overheads in all of our experiments for both micro-benchmarks and application benchmarks. On the other hand, CryptMPI, which encrypts and decrypts messages in the MPI library, achieves much higher performance than the container built-in encryption schemes.