Virtualized Environments for the Harness High Performance Computing Workbench

Abstract

This paper describes recent accomplishments in providing a virtualized environment concept and prototype for scientific application development and deployment as part of the Harness High Performance Computing (HPC) Workbench research effort. The presented work focuses on tools and mechanisms that simplify scientific application development and deployment tasks, such that only minimal adaptation is needed when moving from one HPC system to another or after HPC system upgrades. The overall technical approach focuses on the concept of adapting the HPC system environment to the actual needs of individual scientific applications instead of the traditional scheme of adapting scientific applications to individual HPC system environment properties. The presented prototype implementation is based on the mature and lightweight chroot virtualization approach for Unix-type systems with a focus on virtualized file system structure and virtualized shell environment variables utilizing virtualized environment configuration descriptions in Extensible Markup Language (XML) format. The presented work can be easily extended to other virtualization technologies, such as system-level virtualization solutions using hypervisors.