Minisymposium Presentation

The domain of high-performance computing is currently experiencing a paradigm shift known as "convergent computing":Cloud providers are now able to provide supercomputer-like performance, and HPC centers are improving their utilization with multi-tenancy models, blurring the line between these domains.

At the same time, a decades-old idea called Unikernels experiences a revival in cloud computing.These library-operating system images aim to achieve high-performance and low overhead while maintaining high isolation, making them suitable for modern convergent cloud systems.

Isolation, however, is not a “silver bullet” for ensuring security and integrity.Offloading computations to a computation provider requires trust in that party and their infrastructure.That’s what a set of technologies called confidential computing aims to solve.In cloud and HPC, most implementations of confidential computing are based on virtualization. Therefore, combining it with Unikernels appears to be a logical next step.

This presentation will explore how supercomputing can benefit from confidential computing and Unikernels, discuss the effects of confidential computing technologies on Unikernels, and share our experiences in integrating them into our own Unikernel Hermit.