Sandia investigates use of supercomputer virtualization

Research is underway to determine the possibility of leveraging virtualization in supercomputers. Funded by U.S. Energy Department's Sandia National Laboratories and the U.S. National Science Foundation, the goal is to disprove conventional thinking that virtualization presents too high an overhead computationally to be useful in a supercomputer.

Researcher Kevin Pedretti says, "Our focus is to create a more flexible supercomputer environment for users, without sacrificing performance or scalability." In addition, the ability to make use of virtualization could also mean that simulations and number crunching would no longer be limited to the operating system that the supercomputer is based on.

For now, the researchers are conducting their tests using virtualization software developed for the HPC computing environment, which the researchers say is more suitable for high-performance computing.

For more on this story:
- check out this article at Network World

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