Machine virtualization and cloud computing environment have highlighted for last several years. This trend is based on the endeavor to enhance the utilization and reduce the ownership cost of machines. On the other hand, in aspect of high performance computing, graphics processing unit (GPU) has proved its capability for general purpose computing in many research areas. Evolving from traditional APIs such as the OpenGL and the Direct3D to program GPU as a graphics device, the CUDA of NIVDIA and the OpenCL provide more general programming environment for users. By supporting memory access model, interfaces to access GPUs directly and programming toolkits, users can perform parallel computation using the hundreds of GPU cores. In this paper, we propose a GPU virtualization mechanism to exploit GPU on virtualized cloud computing environment. Differently from the previous work which mostly reimplemented GPU programming APIs and virtual device drivers, our proposed mechanism uses the direct pass-through of PCI-E channel having GPU. The main limitation of previous approaches is virtualization overhead. Since they were focused on the sharing of GPU among virtual machines, they reimplemented GPU programming APIs at virtual machine monitor (VMM) level, and it incurred significant performance overhead. Moreover, if APIs are changed, they need to reengineer the most of APIs. In our approach, bypassing virtual machine monitor layer with negligible overhead, the mechanism can achieve similar computation performance to bare-metal system and is transparent to the GPU programming APIs.

The current GPU virtualization techniques incur large overheads when executing application programs mainly due to the fine-grain time-sharing scheduling of the GPU among multiple Virtual Machines (VMs). Besides, the current techniques lack of portability, because they include the APIs for the GPU computations in the VM monitor. In this paper, we propose a low overhead and high performance GPU virtualization approach on a heterogeneous HPC system based on the open-source Xen. Our proposed techniques are tailored to the bio applications. In our virtualization framework, we allow a VM to solely occupy a GPU once the VM is assigned a GPU instead of relying on the time-sharing the GPU. This improves the performance of the applications and the utilization of the GPUs. Our techniques also allow a direct pass-through to the GPU by using the IOMMU virtualization features embedded in the hardware for the high portability.Experimental studies using microbiology genome analysis applications show that our proposed techniques based on the direct pass-through significantly reduce the overheads compared with the previous Domain0 based approaches. Furthermore, our approach closely matches the performance for the applications to the bare machine or rather improves the performance.

With the advent of digital convergence trends, the current smartphone equipped with more powerful hardware and complex software to satisfy the increased user requirements. Additionally, similar to video game console, the pioneers of smartphone manufacturers consider adopting the motion recognition to extend their functionality. In this paper, we modify a commodity smartphone system to recognize the motion of users using an on-board camera and the OpenCV library. Additionally, we also implement a performance monitoring system which consists of a kernel monitoring module and a user-level logger. Based on the system, we analyze the performance impact and bottleneck of motion recognition with representative smartphone workloads, and propose the points for improvement in term of system architecture.