Domingues, Patrício RodriguesAraújo, FilipeSilva, Luís2009-08-142009-08-142009-05http://hdl.handle.net/10400.8/119Comunicação apresentada no 3rd Workshop on Desktop Grids and Volunteer Computing Systems, Rome, 2009.We experimentally evaluate the performance overhead of the virtual environments VMware Player, QEMU, VirtualPC and VirtualBox on a dual-core machine. Firstly, we assess the performance of a Linux guest OS running on a virtual machine by separately benchmarking the CPU, file I/O and the network bandwidth. These values are compared to the performance achieved when applications are run on a Linux OS directly over the physical machine. Secondly, we measure the impact that a virtual machine running a volunteer @home project worker causes on a host OS. Results show that performance attainable on virtual machines depends simultaneously on the virtual machine software and on the application type, with CPU-bound applications much less impacted than IO-bound ones. Additionally, the performance impact on the host OS caused by a virtual machine using all the virtual CPU, ranges from 10% to 35%, depending on the virtual environment.engVolunteer computingDesktop gridsconference object