What a way to kick off the new decade. The world of supercomputing is starting to converge with the world of virtualization. Many of the folks who are building some of the fastest and largest computers in the world are now evaluating what is quickly becoming the mainstay technology of IT data centers.

A recent article in HPCWire outlines new research from Sandia National Laboratories, Northwestern University and the University of New Mexico, investigating the impact of virtualization on its Cray XT-based Red Storm Supercomputer which runs 12,960 AMD Opteron™ processors. “Red Storm” is ranked 17^th on the Top500 Supercomputer List published in November 2009. Just as reminder to you – AMD CPU and GPU technology is flying high, driving 4 of the top 5 supercomputers on the current TOP500 List.

To run the tests, the researchers got 12 hours of dedicated system time and they were allotted 6,240 compute nodes. Applications were run in two modes – native, using the Catamount Lightweight Kernel (LWK) operating system and virtualized using a next generation version of LWK (called Kitten) along with the Palacios virtual machine monitor, developed by Northwestern University and the University of New Mexico.

As described in a recent PCWorld article, the results – virtualized programs ran at 95 percent of the speed of programs running natively – an amazing testimony to the maturity of virtualization hardware and software. Palacios is an OS-independent, type I virtual machine monitor that builds on the virtualization extensions in modern x86 processors like AMD Virtualization™ technology (AMD-V™) found in all  AMD Opteron processors currently shipping. If you are interested in more details on this project, check out the white paper Palacios and Kitten: High Performance Operating Systems for Scalable Virtualized and Native Supercomputing.

Here’s what I find most interesting – as indicated in the above articles, these researchers are investigating virtualization for a much different reason than commercial data centers. Consolidation of resources has been the initial driver of virtualization for businesses, with the goal of reducing the number of older, underutilized servers taking up valuable floor space and sucking up power and cooling resources. A practical but rather reactive approach.

In the world of supercomputing the problem is typically not underutilized servers. For Red Storm, virtualization is tool to create a more flexible and robust supercomputer environment. The goal is to create an environment where researchers doing large-scale simulations or number-crunches are not limited only to applications that run on a particular supercomputer’s native operating system but also have access to a richer set of applications delivered via virtual machines. This has to be done without sacrificing performance or scalability and with minimal additional management time and expense. A practical approach and it feels more proactive.

This experiment on Red Storm reinforces to me that the days of virtualization being used only as a tactical tool to drive consolidation are coming to an end. I see the use of virtualization moving into an era where its main role is to improve management and operations of computing environments – from small business systems to the largest supercomputers.  The recent announcement by HP and Microsoft to provide integrated, interoperable virtualization and management tools that enable environments that are more automatically provisioned, managed and continuously self-tuned is more evidence of this trend.

What do you think? Has the time come for virtualization to become a base level technology for supercomputers? Are we finally moving away from the idea that virtualization is just a consolidation play?

Margaret Lewis (@margaretjlewis) is a Product Marketing Director at AMD. Her postings are her own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.