Virtualizing a Supercomputer 57
bridges writes "The V3VEE project has announced the release of version 1.2 of the Palacios virtual machine monitor following the successful testing of Palacios on 4096 nodes of the Sandia Red Storm supercomputer, the 17th-fastest in the world. The added overhead of virtualization is often a show-stopper, but the researchers observed less than 5% overhead for two real, communication-intensive applications running in a virtual machine on Red Storm. Palacios 1.2 supports virtualization of both desktop x86 hardware and Cray XT supercomputers using either AMD SVM or Intel VT hardware virtualization extensions, and is an active open source OS research platform supporting projects at multiple institutions. Palacios is being jointly developed by researchers at Northwestern University, the University of New Mexico, and Sandia National Labs." The ACM's writeup has more details of the work at Sandia.
so they are 'only' wasting 200 machines (Score:1, Insightful)
5% may not sound like mubh, cut with 4096 nodes that's over 200 nodes that they are wasting.
Re:Why? (Score:5, Insightful)
> What is the point of virtualizing a supercomputer?
They'll be able to reload the image of your stellar evolution simulation in a few seconds after the guy doing nuclear weapons simulations has had his time. Never mind that the two simulations don't even run under the same OS.