Recent development in lightweight OS-level virtualization, containers, provides a potential solution for running HPC applications on the cloud platform. In this work, we focus on the impact of different layers in a containerized environment when migrating HPC containers from a dedicated HPC system to a cloud platform. On three ARM-based platforms, including the latest Nvidia Grace CPU, we use six representative HPC applications to characterize the impact of container virtualization, host OS and kernel, and rootless and privileged container execution. Our results indicate less than 4\% container overhead in DGEMM, miniMD, and XSBench, but 8\%-10\% overhead in FFT, HPCG, and Hypre. We also show that changing between the container execution modes results in negligible performance differences in the six applications.

翻译：轻量级操作系统级虚拟化技术——容器的最新发展，为在云平台上运行高性能计算（HPC）应用提供了潜在的解决方案。在本研究中，我们重点关注当将HPC容器从专用的HPC系统迁移至云平台时，容器化环境中不同层次所产生的影响。我们在三个基于ARM架构的平台（包括最新的英伟达Grace CPU）上，使用六个具有代表性的HPC应用程序，来量化分析容器虚拟化、宿主机操作系统与内核、以及无根模式与特权模式容器执行所带来的性能影响。我们的实验结果表明，在DGEMM、miniMD和XSBench中容器开销低于4%，但在FFT、HPCG和Hypre中开销达到8%-10%。我们还发现，在这六个应用程序中，切换容器执行模式所产生的性能差异可以忽略不计。