Bare Metal Compared with Kubernetes
Mon, 17 Aug 2020 23:55:52 -0000
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It has been fascinating to watch the tide of application containerization build from stateless cloud native web applications to every type of data-centric workload. These workloads include high performance computing (HPC), machine learning and deep learning (ML/DL), and now most major SQL and NoSQL databases. As an example, I recently read the following Dell Technologies knowledge base article: Bare Metal vs Kubernetes: Distributed Training with TensorFlow.
Bare metal and bare metal server refer to implementations of applications that are directly on the physical hardware without virtualization, containerization, and cloud hosting. Many times, bare metal is compared to virtualization and containerization is used to contrast performance and manageability features. For example, contrasting an application on bare metal to an application running in a container can provide insights into the potential performance differences between the two implementations.
Figure 1: Comparison of bare metal to containers implementations
Containers encapsulate an application with supporting binaries and libraries to run on one shared operating system. The container’s runtime engine or management applications, such as Kubernetes, manage the container. Because of the shared operating system, a container’s infrastructure is lightweight, providing more reason to understand the differences in terms of performance.
In the case of comparing bare metal with Kubernetes, distributed training with TensorFlow performance was measured in terms of throughput. That is, we measured the number of images per second when training CheXNet. Five tests were run in which each test consecutively added more GPUs across the bare metal and Kubernetes systems. The solid data points in Figure 2 show that the tests were run using 1, 2, 3, 4, and 8 GPUs.
Figure 2: Running CheXNet training on Kubernetes compared to bare metal
Figure 2 shows that the Kubernetes container configuration was similar in terms of performance to the bare metal configuration through 4 GPUs. The test through 8 GPUs shows an eight percent increase for bare metal compared with Kubernetes. However, the article that I referenced offers factors that might contribute to the delta:
- The bare metal system takes advantage of the full bandwidth and latency of raw InfiniBand while the Kubernetes configuration uses software defined networking using flannel.
- The Kubernetes configuration uses IP over InfiniBand, which can reduce available bandwidth.
Studies like this are useful because they provide performance insight that customers can use. I hope we see more studies that encompass other workloads. For example, a study about Oracle and SQL Server databases in containers compared with running on bare metal would be interesting. The goal would be to understand how a Kubernetes ecosystem can support a broad ecosystem of different workloads.
Hope you like the blog!
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Omnia: Open-source deployment of high-performance clusters to run simulation, AI, and data analytics workloads
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High Performance Computing (HPC), in which clusters of machines work together as one supercomputer, is changing the way we live and how we work. These clusters of CPU, memory, accelerators, and other resources help us forecast the weather and understand climate change, understand diseases, design new drugs and therapies, develop safe cars and planes, improve solar panels, and even simulate life and the evolution of the universe itself. The cluster architecture model that makes this compute-intensive research possible is also well suited for high performance data analytics (HPDA) and developing machine learning models. With the Big Data era in full swing and the Artificial Intelligence (AI) gold rush underway, we have seen marketing teams with their own Hadoop clusters attempting to transition to HPDA and finance teams managing their own GPU farms. Everyone has the same goals: to gain new, better insights faster by using HPDA and by developing advanced machine learning models using techniques such as deep learning and reinforcement learning. Today, everyone has a use for their own high-performance computing cluster. It’s the age of the clusters!
Today's AI-driven IT Headache: Siloed Clusters and Cluster Sprawl
Unfortunately, cluster sprawl has taken over our data centers and consumes inordinate amounts of IT resources. Large research organizations and businesses have a cluster for this and a cluster for that. Perhaps each group has a little “sandbox” cluster, or each type of workload has a different cluster. Many of these clusters look remarkably similar, but they each need a dedicated system administrator (or set of administrators), have different authorization credentials, different operating models, and sit in different racks in your data center. What if there was a way to bring them all together?
That’s why Dell Technologies, in partnership with Intel, started the Omnia project.
The Omnia Project
The Omnia project is an open-source initiative with a simple aim: To make consolidated infrastructure easy and painless to deploy using open open source and free use software. By bringing the best open source software tools together with the domain expertise of Dell Technologies' HPC & AI Innovation Lab, HPC & AI Centers of Excellence, and the broader HPC Community, Omnia gives customers decades of accumulated expertise in deploying state-of-the-art systems for HPC, AI, and Data Analytics – all in a set of easily executable Ansible playbooks. In a single day, a stack of servers, networking switches, and storage arrays can be transformed into one consolidated cluster for running all your HPC, AI, and Data Analytics workloads.
Omnia project logo
Simple by Design
Omnia’s design philosophy is simplicity. We look for the best, most straightforward approach to solving each task.
- Need to run the Slurm workload manager? Omnia assembles Ansible plays which build the right rpm files and deploy them correctly, making sure all the correct dependencies are installed and functional.
- Need to run the Kubernetes container orchestrator? Omnia takes advantage of community supported package repositories for Linux (currently CentOS) and automates all the steps for creating a functional multi-node Kubernetes cluster.
- Need a multi-user, interactive Python/R/Julia development environment? Omnia takes advantage of best-of-breed deployments for Kubernetes through Helm and OperatorHub, provides configuration files for dynamic and persistent storage, points to optimized containers in DockerHub, Nvidia GPU Cloud (NGC), or other container registries for unaccelerated and accelerated workloads, and automatically deploys machine learning platforms like Kubeflow.
Before we go through the process of building something from scratch, we will make sure there isn’t already a community actively maintaining that toolset. We’d rather leverage others' great work than reinvent the wheel.
Inclusive by Nature
Omnia’s contribution philosophy is inclusivity. From code and documentation updates to feature requests and bug reports, every user’s contributions are welcomed with open arms. We provide an open forum for conversations about feature ideas and potential implementation solutions, making use of issue threads on GitHub. And as the project grows and expands, we expect the technical governance committee to grow to include the top contributors and stakeholders from the community.
What's Next?
Omnia is just getting started. Right now, we can easily deploy Slurm and Kubernetes clusters from a stack of pre-provisioned, pre-networked servers, but our aim is higher than that. We are currently adding capabilities for performing bare-metal provisioning and supporting new and varying types of accelerators. In the future, we want to collect information from the iDRAC out-of-band management system on Dell EMC PowerEdge servers, configure Dell EMC PowerSwitch Ethernet switches, and much more.
What does the future hold? While we have plans in the near-term for additional feature integrations, we are looking to partner with the community to define and develop future integrations. Omnia will grow and develop based on community feedback and your contributions. In the end, the Omnia project will not only install and configure the open source software we at Dell Technologies think is important, but the software you – the community – want it to, as well! We can’t think of a better way for our customers to be able to easily setup clusters for HPC, AI, and HPDA workloads, all while leveraging the expertise of the entire Dell Technologies' HPC Community.
Omnia is available today on GitHub at https://github.com/dellhpc/omnia. Join the community now and help guide the design and development of the next generation of open-source consolidated cluster deployment tools!