Container-based Virtual Elastic Clusters

[EN] eScience demands large-scale computing clusters to support the efficient execution of resource-intensive scientific applications. Virtual Machines (VMs) have introduced the ability to provide customizable execution environments, at the expense of performance loss for applications. However, in r...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores: Alfonso Laguna, Carlos De|||0000-0002-2378-021X, Calatrava Arroyo, Amanda|||0000-0002-9018-9171, Moltó, Germán|||0000-0002-8049-253X
Tipo de recurso: artículo
Fecha de publicación:2017
País:España
Institución:Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV)
Repositorio:RiuNet. Repositorio Institucional de la Universitat Politécnica de Valéncia
Idioma:inglés
OAI Identifier:oai:riunet.upv.es:10251/99751
Acceso en línea:https://riunet.upv.es/handle/10251/99751
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:Computing
Containers
Cluster computing
Elasticity
LENGUAJES Y SISTEMAS INFORMATICOS
CIENCIAS DE LA COMPUTACION E INTELIGENCIA ARTIFICIAL
Descripción
Sumario:[EN] eScience demands large-scale computing clusters to support the efficient execution of resource-intensive scientific applications. Virtual Machines (VMs) have introduced the ability to provide customizable execution environments, at the expense of performance loss for applications. However, in recent years, containers have emerged as a light-weight virtualization technology compared to VMs. Indeed, the usage of containers for virtual clusters allows better performance for the applications and fast deployment of additional working nodes, for enhanced elasticity. This paper focuses on the deployment, configuration and management of Virtual Elastic computer Clusters (VEC) dedicated to process scientific workloads. The nodes of the scientific cluster are hosted in containers running on bare-metal machines. The opensource tool Elastic Cluster for Docker (EC4Docker) is introduced, integrated with Docker Swarm to create auto-scaled virtual computer clusters of containers across distributed deployments. We also discuss the benefits and limitations of this solution and analyse the performance of the developed tools under a real scenario by means of a scientific use case that demonstrates the feasibility of the proposed approach.