Many current high-performance clusters include one or more GPUs per node in order to dramatically reduce application execution time, but the utilization of these accelerators is usually far below 100%. In this context, emote GPU virtualization can help to reduce acquisition costs as well as the overall energy consumption. In this paper, we investigate the potential overhead and bottlenecks of several “heterogeneous” scenarios consisting of client GPU-less nodes running CUDA applications and remote GPU-equipped server nodes providing access to NVIDIA hardware accelerators. The experimental evaluation is performed using three general-purpose multicore processors (Intel Xeon, Intel Atom and ARM Cortex A9), two graphics accelerators (NVIDIA GeForce GTX480 and NVIDIA Quadro M1000), and two relevant scientific applications (CUDASW++ and LAMMPS) arising in bioinformatics and molecular dynamics simulations.
(A. Castelló, J. Duato, R. Mayo, A. J. Peña, E. S. Quintana-Ortí, V. Roca, and F. Silla, “On the Use of Remote GPUs and Low-Power Processors for the Acceleration of Scientific Applications”. Fourth International Conference on Smart Grids, Green Communications and IT Energy-aware Technologies, ENERGY 2014, Chamonix (France), pp. 57–62, 20 – 24 April 2014. [PDF])