Bridging the Virtualization Performance Gap for HPC Using SR-IOV for InfiniBand

This paper shows that using SRIOV for InfiniBand can enable virtualized HPC, but only if the NIC tunable parameters are set appropriately. In particular, contrary to common belief, our results show that the default policy of aggressive use of interrupt moderation can have a negative impact on the performance of InfiniBand platforms virtualized using SR-IOV. Careful tuning of interrupt moderation benefits both Native and VM platforms and helps to bridge the gap between native and virtualized performance. For some workloads, the performance gap is reduced by 15-30%.