Performance evaluation of environmental applications using TELEMAC-MASCARET on virtual platforms

Minh Thanh Chung, Manh-Thin Nguyen, Nhu-Y. Nguyen-Huynh, Nguyen Thong, Nam Thoai

Abstract: Environmental issues can be simulated in High Performance Computing (HPC) systems such as simulating flood inundation. This paper presents the simulation of two problems in Vietnam using TELEMAC-MASCARET, namely flood and salinization of Ho Chi Minh city and Mekong Delta. Evaluating these simulations on both physical machines and virtualization platforms are introduced in detail. To meet the requirements of serving multiple users or different simulation problems, virtualization environment offers feasible solutions and ensures the availability as well as the flexibility. Besides the popularity of virtual machine (VM) in Cloud, recently there is a lightweight virtualization platform called Docker. In this paper, we propose a model for deploying TELEMAC on Docker. Then, we show evaluations through different scenarios when deploying TELEMAC on Docker and VM. Docker has more potential with the lightweight architecture, especially its overhead is nearly negligible. The performance of Docker is better than VM, and the execution time of TELEMAC can be reduced significantly. The execution time of VM is about 1.6 times longer than Docker in terms of running the simulations of environment-related problems in Vietnam.