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 …

Date

June 27, 2014

Authors

John Paul Walters, Andrew J Younge, Dong In Kang, Ke Thia Yao, Mikyung Kang, Stephen P Crago, Geoffrey C Fox

Conference

2014 IEEE 7th international conference on cloud computing

Pages

636-643

Publisher

IEEE