In recent years, there has been a growing interest in using virtualization to improve the efficiency of data centers. This success is rooted in virtualization's excellent fault tolerance and isolation properties, in the overall flexibility it brings, and in its ability to exploit multicore architectures efficiently. These characteristics also make virtualization an ideal candidate to tackle issues found in new compute cluster architectures. However, in spite of recent improvements in virtualization technology, overheads in the execution of parallel applications remain, which prevent its use in the field of high performance computing. In this thesis, we propose a virtual device dedicated to message passing between virtual machines, so as to improve the performance of parallel applications executed in a cluster of virtual machines. We also introduce a set of techniques facilitating the deployment of virtualized parallel applications. These functionalities have been implemented as part of a runtime system which allows to benefit from virtualization's properties in a way that is as transparent as possible to the user while minimizing performance overheads.
