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 multicore 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 multicore 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.