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Looking for a feedback if anyone has already played with running ScaleMP linux appliances in OpenStack (KVM)?

A short description of the setup (w/ or w/o InfiniBand, total amount of RAM, etc) and its performance for matrix vector multiplication (similar to the picture below) would be highly appreciated.

http://www.scalemp.com/uploads/images/performance2/Performance_20121107_102.PNG

Note that the matrix size has to be big enough to trigger network data transfer.

Ultimately I am interested in KVM (OpenStack) overhead in that situation (so I guess similar experience with other clouds should also be very informative).

PS also look at a nice answer explaining ScaleMP "features" https://serverfault.com/a/214185/106906

[EDIT]

What is actually proposed by vSMP guys is to run cloud on top of ScaleMP.. But I do not know if they already support OpenStack or compatible cloud standards? It makes an impression of partially overlapping functionality..and I wonder if this is only "marketing" or indeed something that is worth looking at.

In any case, for now I am curious only about transparent RAM-over-network mapping technology. Does OpenStack already provide an alternative to this?

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Yauhen Yakimovich
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2 Answers2

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OpenStack does not provide any support on its own for distributed shared memory.

Lorin Hochstein
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vSMP Foundation supports for "nested" virtualization. As such, you could run KVM within a VM that is aggregated from multiple servers, using vSMP Foundation. ScaleMP announced that in the future it will be possible to run vSMP Foundation in a "nested" VM - so vSMP Foundation is running on multiple nodes, each one running KVM, and vSMP Foundation inside it.

The performance degradation of "nested" virtualization is well known - and highly depends on the application characteristics and usage model. That derives the number of context switches, memory synchronization load, etc. Overall, ScaleMP presented numbers at the past showing pretty small overhead for the "nested" virtualization use-case, and have users actively working in this environment.

ScaleMP announced that vSMP Foundation 5.0 will specifically address the "RAM-over-network" use case in a more efficient way compared to the past. It worth connecting with the company to check on ScaleMP's upcoming plans.

user163018
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