Performance Impact of IEEE 802.3ad in Container-Based Clouds for HPC Applications

Abstract

Historically, large computational clusters have supported hardware requirements for executing High-Performance Computing (HPC) applications. This model has become out of date due to the high costs of maintaining and updating these infrastructures. Currently, computing resources are delivered as a service because of the cloud computing paradigm. In this way, we witnessed consistent efforts to migrate HPC applications to the cloud. However, if on the one hand cloud computing offers an attractive environment for HPC, benefiting from the pay-per-use model and on-demand resource allocation, on the other, there are still significant performance challenges to be addressed, such as the known network bottleneck. In this article, we evaluate the use of a Network Interface Cards (NIC) aggregation approach, using the IEEE 802.3ad standard to improve the performance of representative HPC applications executed in LXD container based-cloud. We assessed the aggregation impact using two and four NICs with three distinct transmission hash policies. Our results demonstrated that if the correct hash policy is selected, the NIC aggregation can significantly improve the performance of network-intensive HPC applications by up to 40%.