The Laboratory of Adavanced Research on Cloud Computing (LARCC), linked to Setrem, received the award for the best paper in 18° Escola Regional de Alto Desempenho do Estado do Rio Grande do Sul – ERAD/RS 2018, held at UFRGS, in Porto Alegre on April 4-6.

This article makes a performance evaluation on private cloud computing, which are infrastructures located within an enterprise environment. In our day to day, practically everything is in the “cloud”. For example, Youtube, Facebook, Netflix and many other services that are accessed via the internet. In the case of our research, we used Cloudstack to deploy a private cloud. In addition, virtualization systems of different types were used. Virtualizers allow you to virtualize computing resources (memory, processor, and disk) and make it accessible to multiple users.

Different from what most people are accustomed to using in the cloud, the objective of our work was to evaluate the performance behavior of scientific applications, used to do weather forecasting, discovery of disease cure, simulation of fluid dynamics, and many others. It is important to note that these applications perform large amounts of mathematical calculations and require a high performance environment for their execution.

Our tests covered LXC (operating system level virtualization) and KVM (operating system kernel level virtualization) environments. LXC is considered a kind of “light” virtualization because it uses the same Linux operating system kernel to create containers, which in the cloud are known by instances. On the other hand, KVM creates the complete virtualization, in which there are additional layers of abstraction so that you can use or create the instances in the cloud. To characterize the domain of scientific applications, we execute a set of benchmarks that support parallel execution. This set of benchmarks is called NPB (NAS Parallel Benchmarks), which was created by NASA in 1991 to evaluate highly parallel supercomputers and simulates the behavior of scientific applications.

As a result, in 93.75% of the tests run in the cloud environment, cloud instances using LXC have performed better than instances using KVM. In this way, it is noticed that the abstraction layer added by the KVM significantly affects the result. Consequently it has a greater loss of performance.

This achievement represents an important achievement, since it is the first time that LARCC won the best article award in ERAD. The fact that there were more than 40 articles competing, with authors from several other universities, made the award even more representative and disputed. The results presented in this work were obtained through the Course Completion Work (TCC) of students of Computer Networks Anderson Mattheus Maliszewski and Willian Baum. This shows the importance of conducting allied research and laboratory environment TCCs such as the LARCC (Advanced Cloud Computing Research Lab). 

Event Website: http://www.inf.ufrgs.br/erad2018/index.html

Article Title: Desempenho em Instâncias LXC e KVM de Nuvem Privada usando Aplicações Científicas
Authors: Anderson M. Maliszewski, Dalvan Griebler, Claudio Schepke