GPGPU Virtualization Techniques a Comparative Survey

Abstract

The Graphic Processing Units (GPU) are being adopted in many High Processing Computing (HPC) facilities because of their massively parallel and extraordinary computing power, which makes it possible to accelerate many general purpose implementations from different domains. A general-purpose GPU (GPGPU) is a GPU that performs computations that were traditionally handled by central processing unit (CPU) to accelerate applications along with handling traditional computations for graphics rendering. However, GPUs have some limitations, such as increased acquisition costs as well as larger space requirements, more powerful energy supplies, and their utilization is usually low for most workloads. That results in the need of GPU virtualization to maximize the use of an acquired GPU to share between the virtual machines for optimal use, to reduce power utilization and minimize the costs. This study comparatively reviews the recent GPU virtualization techniques including API remoting, para, full and hardware based virtualization, targeted for general-purpose accelerations.