High performance computing (HPC) environments are crucial to innovation today. They drive drug discovery, electronic design automation, digital movie rendering, and deep learning—just to name a few of the many applications. At the same time, an ever-growing need for security is pushing HPC environments from the physical world to the virtual.
Traditional bare-metal HPC systems are unable to meet the requirements for dynamic sharing and isolation of resources, making them incapable of supporting secure multi-tenancy. Aging infrastructures further escalate security concerns. One of the key benefits virtualization offers to the enterprise is enhanced network security. Virtualized HPC environments also provide significant value, allowing IT teams to leverage multi-tenancy to maximize hardware utilization while maintaining complete separation between research projects, ensuring files and data remain private.
While public clouds offer a variety of security policies, challenges related to security and management flexibility still persist. This is especially evident in areas such as clinical genomic sequencing, chip design, and other sensitive research fields that undergo regulatory compliance and demand the highest levels of security. To address these challenges, modern HPC environments require a software-defined networking solution that delivers robust security and streamlines security operations.
In this paper, VMware leverages VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) and one of its core components, NSX-T Data Center, for HPC workloads. A multi-tenant networking architecture is presented, along with an evaluation of HPC application performance when paired with various NSX-T features, including micro-segmentation with the distributed firewall (DFW), encapsulation with GENEVE overlay, and the NSX enhanced data path (ENS)/network stack. Finally, VMware provides a list of best practices.
