vCUDA: GPU accelerated high performance computing in virtual machines

Abstract

This paper describes vCUDA, a GPGPU (General Purpose Graphics Processing Unit) computing solution for virtual machines. vCUDA allows applications executing within virtual machines (VMs) to leverage hardware acceleration, which can be beneficial to the performance of a class of high performance computing (HPC) applications. The key idea in our design is: API call interception and redirection. With API interception and redirection, applications in VMs can access graphics hardware device and achieve high performance computing in a transparent way. We carry out detailed analysis on the performance and overhead of our framework. Our evaluation shows that GPU acceleration for HPC applications in VMs is feasible and competitive with those running in a native, non-virtualized environment. Furthermore, our evaluation also identifies the main cause of overhead in our current framework, and we give some suggestions for future improvement.