mdx II is an Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud platform designed to accelerate data science research and foster cross-disciplinary collaborations among universities and research institutions in Japan. Unlike traditional high-performance computing systems, mdx II leverages OpenStack to provide customizable and isolated computing environments consisting of virtual machines, virtual networks, and advanced storage. This paper presents a comprehensive performance evaluation of mdx II, including a comparison to Amazon Web Services (AWS). We evaluated the performance of a 16-vCPU VM from multiple aspects including floating-point computing performance, memory throughput, network throughput, file system and object storage performance, and real-world application performance. Compared to an AWS 16-vCPU instance, the results indicated that mdx II outperforms AWS in many aspects and demonstrated that mdx II holds significant promise for high-performance data analytics (HPDA) workloads. We also evaluated the virtualization overhead using a 224-vCPU VM occupying an entire host. The results suggested that the virtualization overhead is minimal for compute-intensive benchmarks, while memory-intensive benchmarks experienced larger overheads. These findings are expected to help users of mdx II to obtain high performance for their data science workloads and offer insights to the designers of future data-centric cloud platforms.

翻译：mdx II是一个基础设施即服务（IaaS）云平台，旨在加速数据科学研究并促进日本各大学与研究机构间的跨学科协作。与传统高性能计算系统不同，mdx II利用OpenStack提供由虚拟机、虚拟网络和高级存储组成的可定制化隔离计算环境。本文对mdx II进行了全面的性能评估，包括与亚马逊云服务（AWS）的对比。我们从浮点计算性能、内存吞吐量、网络吞吐量、文件系统与对象存储性能以及实际应用性能等多个维度，评估了16虚拟CPU虚拟机的性能。与AWS 16虚拟CPU实例的对比结果表明，mdx II在多数方面性能优于AWS，并证明其在高性能数据分析（HPDA）工作负载方面具有显著潜力。我们还通过占用整台主机的224虚拟CPU虚拟机评估了虚拟化开销。结果显示，对于计算密集型基准测试，虚拟化开销极小，而内存密集型基准测试则承受了较大开销。这些发现有望帮助mdx II用户为其数据科学工作负载获取高性能，并为未来以数据为中心的云平台设计者提供参考。