Presentation
Poster 88: HPC Container Runtime Performance Overhead: At First Order, There Is None
SessionResearch Posters Display
Event Type
Posters
Research Posters
TP
EX
EXH
TimeThursday, 21 November 20198:30am - 5pm
LocationE Concourse
DescriptionLinux containers are an increasingly popular method used by HPC centers to meet increasing demand for greater software flexibility. A common concern is that containers may introduce application performance overhead. Prior work has not tested a broad set of HPC container technologies on a broad set of benchmarks. This poster addresses the gap by comparing performance of the three HPC container implementations (Charliecloud, Shifter, and Singularity) and bare metal on multiple dimensions using industry-standard benchmarks.
We found no meaningful performance differences between the four environments with the possible exception of modest variation in memory usage, which is broadly consistent with prior results. This result suggests that HPC users should feel free to containerize their applications without concern about performance degradation, regardless of the container technology used. It is an encouraging development on the path towards greater adoption of user-defined software stacks to increase the flexibility of HPC.
We found no meaningful performance differences between the four environments with the possible exception of modest variation in memory usage, which is broadly consistent with prior results. This result suggests that HPC users should feel free to containerize their applications without concern about performance degradation, regardless of the container technology used. It is an encouraging development on the path towards greater adoption of user-defined software stacks to increase the flexibility of HPC.
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