Abstract-As more scientific workloads are moved into the cloud, the need for high performance accelerators increases. Accelerators such as GPUs offer improvements in both performance and power efficiency over traditional multi-core processors; however, their use in the cloud has been limited. Today, several common hypervisors support GPU passthrough, but their performance has not been systematically characterized.In this paper we show that low overhead GPU passthrough is achievable across 4 major hypervisors and two processor microarchitectures. We compare the performance of two generations of NVIDIA GPUs within the Xen, VMWare ESXi, and KVM hypervisors, and we also compare the performance to that of Linux Containers (LXC). We show that GPU passthrough to KVM achieves 98-100% of the base system's performance across two architectures, while Xen and VMWare achieve 96-99% of the base systems performance, respectively. In addition, we describe several valuable lessons learned through our analysis and share the advantages and disadvantages of each hypervisor/GPU passthrough solution.
With the advent of virtualization and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), the broader scientific computing community is considering the use of clouds for their technical computing needs. This is due to the relative scalability, ease of use, advanced user environment customization abilities clouds provide, as well as many novel computing paradigms available for data-intensive applications. However, there is concern about a performance gap that exists between the performance of IaaS when compared to typical high performance computing (HPC) resources, which could limit the applicability of IaaS for many potential scientific users.Most recently, general-purpose graphics processing units (GPGPUs or GPUs) have become commonplace within high performance computing. We look to bridge the gap between supercomputing and clouds by providing GPU-enabled virtual machines (VMs) and investigating their feasibility for advanced scientific computation. Specifically, the Xen hypervisor is utilized to leverage specialized hardware-assisted I/O virtualization and PCI passthrough in order to provide advanced HPC-centric Nvidia GPUs directly in guest VMs. This methodology is evaluated by measuring the performance of two Nvidia Tesla GPUs within Xen VMs and comparing to bare-metal hardware. Results show PCI passthrough of GPUs within virtual machines is a viable use case for many scientific computing workflows, and could help support high performance cloud infrastructure in the near future.
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