On the Applicability of Virtualization in an Industrial HPC Environment

Virtual machines and, to a lesser extent, operating system level virtualization (also referred to as containers) allow for creation of tailored execution environments. This allows software installations to only have to target one environment, making deployment much easier for different platforms. For this reason the technique is used nowadays in most cloud systems. In this paper we present an industrial setting in which a simulation code should be available on both different HPC cluster environments as well as on standalone workstations. To make deployment easier, we propose the use of virtualization and describe our prototype. Furthermore, we discuss benefits and challenges.