New GPGPU Transparent Virtualization Component for HPC clouds

Researchers at the Department of Applied Science of the University of Napoli Parthenope have developed a new GPGPU Transparent Virtualization Component for HPC clouds.

Elastic computer power and storage provided by a cloud infrastructure may be attractive but it is still limited by poor communication performance and lack of support in using GPGPUs within a virtual machine instance. The GPU Virtualization Service (gVirtuS) presented in this work tries to fill the gap between in-house hosted computing clusters, equipped with GPGPUs devices, and pay-for-use high performance virtual clusters deployed via public or private computing clouds. gVirtuS allows an instanced virtual machine to access GPGPUs in a transparent way, with an overhead slightly greater than a real machine/GPGPU setup. gVirtuS is hypervisor independent, and, even though it currently virtualizes nVIDIA CUDA based GPUs, it is not limited to a specific brand technology.