abstract.txt

Cloud computing infrastructures provide vast processing power and host a
diverse set of computing workloads, ranging from service-oriented deployments
to HPC applications. As HPC applications scale to a large number of VMs,
providing near-native network I/O performance to each peer VM is an important
challenge. To deploy communication-intensive applications in the cloud, we have
to fully exploit the underlying hardware, while at the same time retaining the
benefits of virtualization: consolidation, flexibility, isolation, and ease of
management. Current approaches present either limited performance or require
specialized hardware that increases the complexity of the setup.

In this talk we present an overview of current approaches on I/O (software and
hardware) in two of the most popular open-source virtualization platforms: Xen
and KVM. We walk through the I/O stack, focusing on network communication
intra-node as well as inter-node. To illustrate the caveats and benefits of
each approach we use the paradigm of a VM-aware interconnection protocol over
generic Ethernet.