This chapter describes our work at VMware to support HPC applications. The first section describes in detail many of the values identified by customers of using virtualization in HPC environments. The second section shows a few examples of how virtualization is deployed in an HPC environment, and the third discusses various aspects of performance, starting with an examination of some core aspects of performance, and then turning to throughput applications and performance for parallel-distributed Message Passing Interface (MPI) applications. It also includes pointers to several technical publications that will be of interest to those considering virtualizing their HPC workloads.

The majority of HPC systems are clusters, which are aggregations of compute nodes connected via some interconnect, such as Ethernet or InfiniBand (IB). Clusters can range in size from a small handful of nodes to tens of thousands of nodes. HPC clusters exist to run HPC jobs, and the placement...