PVC: A novel personal virtual cluster based on multi-core platform

As multi-core processors become increasingly the mainstream, people have likewise become more interested in how best to make use of the computing capacity of the CPU. Although many methods, running multi-thread application for example, have been adopted to increase the CPU utilization, most multi-core PC´s and workstation´s CPU cycles are idle, even during peak hours. So it is an efficient solution to help a personal user to build his own small non-dedicated cluster by collecting some idle PC in a LAN. In order to improve the utilization of the multi-core processor and shield the heterogeneity of different platform, virtual machine (VM) technology can be applied to partition the resource of each computer, changing a physical node into several homogeneous virtual nodes. This personal virtual cluster (PVC) can be created, managed, and released by a personal user, and run some computationally intensive parallel program such as application with MPI during some temporary time. In this paper we present a prototype of PVC with the popular, open-source, Xen virtualization system, and investigate the performance of the typical parallel programming paradigm MPI in PVC. The results of experiments show that the PVC is a helpful computing mode for a personal user in a LAN, and the application with MPI without much communication between different processes can achieve good performance in PVC.