Testing performance of application containers in the cloud with hpc loads

Abstract

In this paper, we evaluate HPC application deployment using container technology and examine performance metrics on a public cloud. The research focuses on the ease of deployment, performance and isolation issues related to application containers (Docker) and HPC software, which is OpenFOAM in our case. We find that performance of Docker is comparable to Physical or Virtual HPC alternatives with negligible overheads (5%), whereas its savings in setup and deployment times are drastically better (10-15x).