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This paper describes vCUDA, a general-purpose graphics processing unit (GPGPU) computing solution for virtual machines (VMs). vCUDA allows applications executing within VMs to leverage hardware acceleration, which can be beneficial to the performance of a class of high-performance computing (HPC) applications. The key insights in our design include API call interception and redirection and a dedicated RPC system for VMs. With API interception and redirection, Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA) applications in VMs can access a graphics hardware device and achieve high computing performance in a transparent way. In the current study, vCUDA achieved a near-native performance with the dedicated RPC system. We carried out a detailed analysis of the performance of our framework. Using a number of unmodified official examples from CUDA SDK and third-party applications in the evaluation, we observed that CUDA applications running with vCUDA exhibited a very low performance penalty in comparison with the native environment, thereby demonstrating the viability of vCUDA architecture.
Shi et al. (Tue,) studied this question.