Palacios and kitten: New high performance operating systems for scalable virtualized and native supercomputing

John Lange*, Kevin Pedretti, Trammell Hudson, Peter A Dinda, Zheng Cui, Lei Xia, Patrick Bridges, Andy Gocke, Steven Jaconette, Mike Levenhagen, Ron Brightwell

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

127 Scopus citations

Abstract

Palacios is a new open-source VMM under development at Northwestern University and the University of New Mexico that enables applications executing in a virtualized environment to achieve scalable high performance on large machines. Palacios functions as a modularized extension to Kitten, a high performance operating system being developed at Sandia National Laboratories to support large-scale supercomputing applications. Together, Palacios and Kitten provide a thin layer over the hardware to support full-featured virtualized environments alongside Kitten's lightweight native environment. Palacios supports existing, unmodified applications and operating systems by using the hardware virtualization technologies in recent AMD and Intel processors. Additionally, Palacios leverages Kitten's simple memory management scheme to enable low-overhead pass-through of native devices to a virtualized environment. We describe the design, implementation, and integration of Palacios and Kitten. Our benchmarks show that Palacios provides near native (within 5%), scalable performance for virtualized environments running important parallel applications. This new architecture provides an incremental path for applications to use supercomputers, running specialized lightweight host operating systems, that is not significantly performance-compromised.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationProceedings of the 2010 IEEE International Symposium on Parallel and Distributed Processing, IPDPS 2010
DOIs
StatePublished - 2010
Event24th IEEE International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium, IPDPS 2010 - Atlanta, GA, United States
Duration: Apr 19 2010Apr 23 2010

Publication series

NameProceedings of the 2010 IEEE International Symposium on Parallel and Distributed Processing, IPDPS 2010

Other

Other24th IEEE International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium, IPDPS 2010
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityAtlanta, GA
Period4/19/104/23/10

Keywords

  • Cirtual machine monitors
  • High performance computing
  • Lightweight kernels
  • Parallel computing

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Computational Theory and Mathematics
  • Software
  • Theoretical Computer Science

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