Using Docker in High Performance Computing Applications

Virtualization technology plays a vital role in cloud computing. In particular, benefits of virtualization are widely employed in high performance computing (HPC) applications. Recently, virtual machines (VMs) and Docker containers known as two virtualization platforms need to be explored for developing applications efficiently. We target a model for deploying distributed applications on Docker containers, among using well-known benchmarks to evaluate performance between VMs and containers. Based on their architecture, we propose benchmark scenarios to analyze the computing performance and the ability of data access on HPC system. Remarkably, Docker container has more advantages than virtual machine in terms of data intensive application and computing ability, especially the overhead of Docker is trivial. However, Docker architecture has some drawbacks in resource management. Our experiment and evaluation show how to deploy efficiently high performance computing applications on Docker containers and VMs.