GPGPU as a Service

In modern virtual computing environment, the 2D/3D rendering performance and parallel computing potential of GPU (graphics processing unit) must be fully exploited for multiple virtual machines (VMs). Existing GPU virtualization techniques are unable to take full advantage of a GPU's powerful 2D/3D hardware-accelerated graphics rendering performance or parallel computing potential, or it has not been considered that the internal resources of a GPU domain are fairly allocated between VMs with different performance requirements. Therefore, we propose a multi-channel GPU virtualization architecture (VMCG), model the corresponding credit allocating and transferring mechanisms, and redesign the virtual multi-channel GPU fair-scheduling algorithm. VMCG provides a separate V-Channel for each guest VM (DomU) that competes with other VMs for the same physical GPU resources, and each DomU submits command request blocks to its respective V-Channel according to the corresponding DomU ID. Through the virtual multi-channel GPU fair-scheduling algorithm, not only do multiple DomUs make full use of native GPU hardware acceleration, but the fairness of GPU resource allocation is significantly improved during GPU-intensive workloads from multiple DomUs running on the same host. Experimental results show that, for 2D/3D graphics applications, performance is close to 96 percent of that of the native GPU, performance is improved by approximately 500 percent for parallel computing applications, and GPU resource-allocation fairness is improved by approximately 60-80 percent.

Nowadays graphics processing units (GPUs) have become popular parallel computing platforms known as General-Purpose GPU (GPGPU) computing. GPUs thereby are chosen by some security researchers as cryptographic accelerators to secure massive volumes of transactions. However, their security issues are ignored in spite of their popularity and performance. There are some possible information leakages faced with malicious attacks or even in the normal GPU computing. Our objective is to secure the confidentiality of cryptographic keys in GPU computing environments and provide easy-to-use programming with few constraints. In this paper, we propose a prototype in Linux, a system of GPGPU computing solution empowered by GPU virtualization technology, which keeps encrypted keys in guest machine to protect secret keys from leakage even in the event of full system compromise. With the API interception and redirection of CUDA, applications in Virtual Machines (VMs) can access the GPU device in a transparent way. Besides, we use virtio, a dedicated virtual I/O device, to transfer data between virtual and host machines in high performance. In our current study, we evaluate our prototype with the GPU implementation of ECC. We show that it can protect private keys of GPU cryptographic computation and it also incurs low performance penalty compared with the native environment, therefore demonstrating the prototype is secure and requires reasonable overhead.

As the size of data increases and computation becomes complicated in fog computing environments, the need for highperformance computation is increasing. One of the most popular ways to improve the performance of a virtual machine (VM) is to allocate a graphic processing unit (GPU) to the VM for supporting general purpose computing on graphic processing unit (GPGPU) operations. The direct pass-through, often used for GPUs in VMs, is popular in the cloud because VMs can use the full functionality of the GPU and experience virtually no performance degradation owing to virtualization. Direct pass-through is very useful for improving the performance of VMs. However, since the GPU usage time is not considered in the VM scheduler that operates based on the central processing unit (CPU) usage time of the VM, the VM performing the GPGPU operation degrades the performance of other VMs. In this paper, we analyze the effect of the VM performing the GPGPU operation (GPGPU-intensive VM) on other VMs through experiments. Then, we propose a method to mitigate the performance degradation of other VMs by dynamically allocating the resource usage time of the VM and preventing the priority preemption of the GPGPU-intensive VM.

This paper proposes to add the multithreaded Graphic Processing Units (GPUs) to some virtual machines (VMs) in the existing cloud-based VM groups. To handle the multidimensional or multithreaded computing that a CPU cannot process quickly by a GPU that has hundreds of Arithmetic Logic Units (ALUs), and to regulate the time for initiating physical servers by real-time thermal migration, our proposed scheme can enhance the system performance and reduce the energy consumption of long-term computing. Four major techniques in this paper include: (1) GPU virtualization, (2) Hypervisor for GPU, (3) Thermal migration implementation, and (4) Estimation of multithreaded tasks. In no matter quantum mechanics, astronomy, fluid mechanics, or atmospheric simulation and prediction, a GPU suits not only parallel multithreaded computing for its tens of times performance than a CPU, but also multidimensional array operations for its excellent efficiency. Therefore, how to distribute the computing performance of CPUs and GPUs appropriately becomes a significant issue. In general cloud computing applications, it is rarely seen that GPUs can outperform CPUs. Furthermore, for groups of virtual servers, many tasks actually can be completed by CPUs without the support of GPUs. Thus, it is a waste of resources to implement GPUs to all physical servers. For this reason, by integrating with the migration characteristic of VMs, our proposed scheme can estimate whether to compute tasks by physical machines with GPUs or not. In estimating tasks, we use Amdahl’s law to estimate the overall performance include communication delays, Synchronization overhead and me possible additional burden.KeywordsVirtual Machine (VM)MultithreadingGPUCUDAMapreduce

Data in a data center are stored dispersively. The data-oriented task computing disperses big data analysis tasks to different computing nodes. The extensive use of graphics processing unit (GPU) makes it urgent and important to study how to reasonably assign heterogeneous resources to different computing frameworks. We investigate the existing big data computing framework and the GPU computing. Based on the existing cluster resource management model and the GPU management model, we propose a hybrid heterogeneous resource management model that combines CPU resources with GPU resources. The computing nodes manage local resources and implement tasks; the resource management center concertedly manage various computing frameworks. We design and implement a hybrid domain resource sharing and allocation algorithm, which allocates the hybrid domain resources to computing frameworks according to the coordinated use of them so as to fairly share the hybrid domain resources among various computing frameworks and prevent the CPU from too many tasks but the GPU or CPU from resource "hunger". The experimental results show that the allocation algorithm can increase the use of heterogeneous resources and the number of completed tasks by around 15%.

Machine virtualization and cloud computing environment have highlighted for last several years. This trend is based on the endeavor to enhance the utilization and reduce the ownership cost of machines. On the other hand, in aspect of high performance computing, graphics processing unit (GPU) has proved its capability for general purpose computing in many research areas. Evolving from traditional APIs such as the OpenGL and the Direct3D to program GPU as a graphics device, the CUDA of NIVDIA and the OpenCL provide more general programming environment for users. By supporting memory access model, interfaces to access GPUs directly and programming toolkits, users can perform parallel computation using the hundreds of GPU cores. In this paper, we propose a GPU virtualization mechanism to exploit GPU on virtualized cloud computing environment. Differently from the previous work which mostly reimplemented GPU programming APIs and virtual device drivers, our proposed mechanism uses the direct pass-through of PCI-E channel having GPU. The main limitation of previous approaches is virtualization overhead. Since they were focused on the sharing of GPU among virtual machines, they reimplemented GPU programming APIs at virtual machine monitor (VMM) level, and it incurred significant performance overhead. Moreover, if APIs are changed, they need to reengineer the most of APIs. In our approach, bypassing virtual machine monitor layer with negligible overhead, the mechanism can achieve similar computation performance to bare-metal system and is transparent to the GPU programming APIs.

Graphical Processing Units (GPU) have become a vital source for data processing in many advanced or intelligent technologies. They have proven to be faster and more efficient than the Central Processing Unit (CPU) in computing large data sets. The automotive industry has adopted GPUs for Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS), but other systems like electric vehicles and autonomous vehicles will also employ GPUs soon. Although GPUs are faster at computing large data sets, a substantial increase in core temperature is challenging during the process. This review paper primarily focuses on active and passive cooling methods for GPUs in the automotive industry. The paper commences by addressing the role and need for GPUs in the automotive industry and explores the challenges they face and the factors that lead to an increase in temperature. The paper further reviews various cooling methods that original equipment manufacturers (OEM) use in the automotive industry. The outcomes of the review are a detailed understanding of the use of GPUs in automotive, a brief interpretation of heating issues in GPUs and what causes them, a comprehensive understanding of the cooling methods used to reduce the core temperature, and a perception of an anticipated technology to resolve the heating problem.

Angular radial transform (ART) is a shape descriptor in MPEG-7 for image representation and image analysis. For real world applications, execution efficiency is always a significant challenge. With widespread use of Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) in image processing tasks, this paper presents GPU based angular radial transform (GART). Proposed parallel GART is based on mathematical properties of ART and optimization techniques of GPU. Optimal parameter selections for GPU execution are also evaluated. In our experiments, with same computation result GART is over 1800 times faster than ART. Wide range of applications that using ART will inspired from this work.

In radiation transport calculations, the effects of material temperature on neutron/nucleus interactions must be taken into account through Doppler broadening adjustments to the microscopic cross section data. Historically, Monte Carlo transport simulations have accounted for this temperature dependence by interpolating among precalculated Doppler broadened cross sections at a variety of temperatures. More recently, there has been much interest in on-the-fly Doppler broadening methods, where reference data is broadened on-demand during particle transport to any temperature. Unfortunately, Doppler broadening operations are expensive on traditional central processing unit (CPU) architectures, making on-the-fly Doppler broadening unaffordable without approximations or complex data preprocessing. This work considers the use of graphics processing unit (GPU)s, which excel at parallel data processing, for on-the-fly Doppler broadening in continuous-energy Monte Carlo simulations. Two methods are considered for the broadening operations – a GPU implementation of the standard SIGMA1 algorithm and a novel vectorized algorithm that leverages the convolution properties of the broadening operation in an attempt to expose additional parallelism. Numerical results demonstrate that similar cross section lookup throughput is obtained for on-the-fly broadening on a GPU as cross section lookup throughput with precomputed data on a CPU, implying that offloading Doppler broadening operations to a GPU may enable on-the-fly temperature treatment of cross sections without a noticeable reduction in cross section processing performance in Monte Carlo transport codes.

Polar Fourier analysis can extract orthogonal and rotation invariant features and demonstrate superior performances in many image processing tasks. For real world applications, execution efficiency is always a significant challenge. With widespread use of Graphics Processing Unit (GPU), this research presents GPU accelerated polar Fourier analysis. Proposed parallel algorithm is based on mathematical properties of polar Fourier analysis and optimization techniques of GPU. Optimal parameter selections for GPU execution are also evaluated. In our experiments, with same computation result proposed method is over 170 times faster. Wide range of applications that using polar Fourier analysis will inspired from this work.

The use of graphics processing units (GPUs) in simulation applications offers a significant speed gain as compared to computations on central processing units (CPUs). Many simulation methods require a large number of independent random variables generated at each step. We present two approaches for implementation of random number generators (RNGs) on a GPU. In the one-RNG-per-thread approach, one RNG produces a stream of random numbers in each thread of execution, whereas the one-RNG-for-all-threads method builds on the ability of different threads to communicate, thus, sharing random seeds across an entire GPU device. We used these approaches to implement Ran2, Hybrid Taus, and Lagged Fibonacci algorithms on a GPU. We profiled the performance of these generators in terms of the computational time, memory usage, and the speedup factor (CPU time/GPU time). These generators have been incorporated into the program for Langevin simulations of biomolecules fully implemented on the GPU. The ∼250-fold computational speedup on the GPU allowed us to carry out single-molecule dynamic force measurements in silico to explore the mechanical properties of the bacteriophage HK97 in the experimental subsecond time scale. We found that the nanomechanical response of HK97 depends on the conditions of force application, including the rate of change and geometry of the mechanical perturbation. Hence, using the GPU-based implementation of RNGs, presented here, in conjunction with Langevin simulations, makes it possible to directly compare the results of dynamic force measurements in vitro and in silico.

In addition to the intended use of graphics processing units (GPU) to accelerate computer games, their potential has become apparent for scientific computations in the recent years. Molecular modeling and molecular design are only few examples of numerous research areas that are significantly benefiting from novel developments of hardware and software platforms. For example, the impact of high computational power of GPUs has been demonstrated in molecular dynamics (MD) simulations or quantum chemical (QC) calculations. Thus far, several MD programs have been adapted to GPU computing, including NAMD/VMD, GROMACS, AMBER, etc. In addition, modeling tools intended for molecular design based on receptor-ligand interactions, such as molecular docking or core hopping protocols have recently been updated for GPU environment. The tremendous increase in the computing power facilitated by the integration of GPUs and the availability of GPU-based systems could accelerate material research on nanoscale. The price/performance ratio of GPU-based systems supports the development of custom-made protocols for efficient modeling of biomolecular systems and nanostructures. GPU-related molecular modeling tools will also accelerate the combined quantum chemical/molecular mechanics (QC/MM) methodologies. An overview of the performance of NVIDIA Tesla GPU-based system built for high-performance and high-throughput computing aimed for biomolecular modeling and nanodesign is presented.

There is great interest in the use of graphics processing units (GPU)for general purpose applications because the highly parallel architectures used in GPUs offer the potential for huge performance increases. The use of GPUs in image analysis applications has been under investigation for a number of years. This article describes modifications to the InsightToolkit (ITK) that provide a simple architecture for transparent use of GPU enabled filters and examples of how to write GPU enabled filters using the NVIDIA CUDA tools.This work was performed between late 2009 and early 2010 and is being published as modifications to ITK 3.20. It is hoped that publication will help inform development of more general GPU support in ITK 4.0 and facilitate experimentation by users requiring functionality of 3.20 or wishing to pursue CUDA based developments.

Network Function Virtualization (NFV) replaces the hardware that supports packet processing in network operation from specific- by general-purpose ones, reducing costs and bringing more flexibility and agility to the network operation. However, this shift can cause performance losses due to the non-optimal packet processing capabilities of the general-purpose hardware. Moreover, supporting the line rate of optical network channels with Virtualized Network Functions (VNFs) is a challenging task. This work analyzes the benefits of using Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) to support the execution of a Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) VNF towards supporting the line rate of an optical channel. The use of GPUs in VNFs has a great potential to increase throughput, but the delay incurred might be an issue for some functions. Our simulation was performed using an Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) which performs DPI deployed as a VNF under real-world traffic scaled to high bit rates. Results show that the packet processing speedup achieved by using GPUs can reach up to 19 times, at the expense of a higher packet delay.

The adoption of cloud computing has grown significantly among individuals and in organizations. According to this growth, Cloud Service Providers have continuously expanded and updated cloud-computing infrastructures, which have become more heterogeneous. Managing these heterogeneous resources in cloud infrastructures while ensuring Quality of Service (QoS) and minimizing energy consumption is a prominent challenge. Therefore, unifying energy consumption models to deal with heterogeneous cloud environments is essential in order to efficiently manage these resources. This paper deeply analyzes factors affecting power consumption and employs these factors to develop power models. Because of the strong correlation between power consumption and energy consumption, the influencing factors on power consumption, with the addition of other factors, are considered when developing energy consumption models to enhance the treatment in heterogeneous infrastructures in cloud computing. These models have been developed for two Virtual Machines (VMs) containing heterogeneous Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) architectures with different features and capabilities. Experiments evaluate the models through a cloud testbed between the actual and predicted values produced by the models. Deep Neural Network (DNN) power models are validated with shallow neural networks using performance counters as inputs. Then, the results are significantly enhanced by 8% when using hybrid inputs (performance counters, GPU and memory utilization). Moreover, a DNN energy-agnostic model to abstract the complexity of heterogeneous GPU architectures is presented for the two VMs. A comparison between the standard and agnostic energy models containing common inputs is conducted in each VM. Agnostic energy models with common inputs for both VMs show a slight enhancement in accuracy with input reduction.