In this chapter, we will learn about the specific aspects of virtualization that can enhance the productivity of a High Performance Computing (HPC) environment. We will focus on the capabilities provided by VMware vSphere, and how virtualization improves scientific productivity.

We will explore vSphere features, such as Single Root I/O Virtualization (SR-IOV), remote direct memory access (RDMA), and vGPU, to architect and meet the requirements for research, computing, academic, scientific, and engineering workloads.

This chapter covers the following topics:

• Virtualizing HPC applications
• Multi-tenancy with guaranteed resources