A Technique for Provisioning Virtual Clusters in Real-time and Improving I/O Performance on Computational-Science Simulation Environments

Computational science simulations have been used to enable discovery in a broad spectrum of application areas, these simulations show irregular demanding characteristics of computing resources from time to time. The adoption of virtualized high performance cloud, rather than CPU-centric computing platform (such as supercomputers), is gaining interest of interests mainly due to its ease-of-use, multi-tenancy and flexibility. Basically, provisioning a virtual cluster, which consists of a lot of virtual machines, in a real-time has a critical impact on the successful deployment of the virtualized HPC clouds for computational science simulations. However, the cost of concurrently creating many virtual machines in constructing a virtual cluster can be as much as two orders of magnitude worse than expected. One of the main factors in this bottleneck is the time spent to create the virtual images for the virtual machines. In this paper, we propose a novel technique to minimize the creation time of virtual machine images and improve I/O performance of the provisioned virtual clusters. We also confirm that our proposed technique outperforms the conventional ones using various sets of experiments.