Virtualization is common in various areas ranging from mobiles to large data centers operated by cloud providers. Theoretically, virtualization provides various benefits that could be useful to HPC as well, e.g., suspend a large application before system maintenance or migrate a process before a node fails due to hardware malfunctioning. In this paper, we analyze the current state of the art of virtual machines for HPC with respect to their performance and energy consumption. Furthermore, we report on our findings on the compatibility of the current HPC software stack with virtual machines and how they complicate application analysis and application tuning, as well as how current HPC hardware limits some benefits of VMs.
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