Direct Pass-Through based GPU Virtualization for Biologic Applications

Abstract

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.