On the Effect of using rCUDA to Provide CUDA Acceleration to Xen Virtual Machines

[EN] Nowadays, many data centers use virtual machines (VMs) in order to achieve a more efficient use of hardware resources. The use of VMs provides a reduction in equipment and maintenance expenses as well as a lower electricity consumption. Nevertheless, current virtualization solutions, such as Xen, do not easily provide graphics processing units (GPUs) to applications running in the virtualized domain with the flexibility usually required in data centers (i.e., managing virtual GPU instances and concurrently sharing them among several VMs). Therefore, the execution of GPU-accelerated applications within VMs is hindered by this lack of flexibility. In this regard, remote GPU virtualization solutions may address this concern. In this paper we analyze the use of the remote GPU virtualization mechanism to accelerate scientific applications running inside Xen VMs. We conduct our study with six different applications, namely CUDA-MEME, CUDASW++, GPU-BLAST, LAMMPS, a triangle count application, referred to as TRICO, and a synthetic benchmark used to emulate different application behaviors. Our experiments show that the use of remote GPU virtualization is a feasible approach to address the current concerns of sharing GPUs among several VMs, featuring a very low overhead if an InfiniBand fabric is already present in the cluster. This work was funded by the Generalitat Valenciana under Grant PROMETEO/2017/077. Authors are also grateful for the generous support provided by Mellanox Technologies Inc. Prades, J.; Reaño González, C.; Silla Jiménez, F. (2019). On the Effect of using rCUDA to Provide CUDA Acceleration to Xen Virtual Machines. Cluster Computing. 22(1):185-204. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10586-018-2845-0 Kernel-Based Virtual Machine, KVM. http://www.linux-kvm.org (2015). Accessed 19 Oct 2015 Xen Project. http://www.xenproject.org/ (2015). Accessed 19 Oct 2015 VMware Virtualization. http://www.vmware.com/ (2015). Accessed 19 Oct 2015 Oracle VM VirtualBox. http://www.virtualbox.org/ (2015). Accessed 19 Oct 2015 Semnanian, A., Pham, J., Englert, B., Wu, X.: Virtualization technology and its impact on computer hardware architecture. In: Proceedings of the Information Technology: New Generations, ITNG, pp. 719–724 (2011) Felter, W., Ferreira, A., Rajamony, R., Rubio, J.: An updated performance comparison of virtual machines and linux containers. In: IBM Research Report (2014) Zhang, J., Lu, X., Arnold, M., Panda, D.: MVAPICH2 over OpenStack with SR-IOV: an effi