A novel GPU resources management and scheduling system based on virtual machines

Abstract

Virtual machine VM technologies offer lots of benefits such as users' isolation, server consolidation and live migration. However, owing to the overhead incurred by indirect access to physical resources such as GPU, IO devices and VM technologies have not been widely used in high performance computing area. General purpose graphics processing unit GPGPU computing solution for virtual machines makes it possible that high performance computing HPC applications running on GPU can be ported to virtual machines VMs environment. A novel GPU resources management system built on VMs called VMGPURMS and a novel GPU cluster schedule policy are presented to use VM as computing node, and enable users to run jobs in the whole virtual machine environment transparently. Evaluation demonstrates that the efficiency of GPUs with the GPU cluster schedule policy could be improved by 17% over the traditional cluster schedule policy without taking GPU into consideration.