GPU Virtualization on VMware’s Hosted I/O Architecture Micah Dowty, Jeremy Sugerman VMware, Inc. 3401 Hillview Ave, Palo Alto, CA 94304
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[email protected] Abstract more computational performance than CPUs. At the Modern graphics co-processors (GPUs) can produce same time, GPU acceleration has extended beyond en- high fidelity images several orders of magnitude faster tertainment (e.g., games and video) into the basic win- than general purpose CPUs, and this performance expec- dowing systems of recent operating systems and is start- tation is rapidly becoming ubiquitous in personal com- ing to be applied to non-graphical high-performance ap- puters. Despite this, GPU virtualization is a nascent field plications including protein folding, financial modeling, of research. This paper introduces a taxonomy of strate- and medical image processing. The rise in applications gies for GPU virtualization and describes in detail the that exploit, or even assume, GPU acceleration makes specific GPU virtualization architecture developed for it increasingly important to expose the physical graph- VMware’s hosted products (VMware Workstation and ics hardware in virtualized environments. Additionally, VMware Fusion). virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) initiatives have led We analyze the performance of our GPU virtualiza- many enterprises to try to simplify their desktop man- tion with a combination of applications and microbench- agement by delivering VMs to their users. Graphics vir- marks. We also compare against software rendering, the tualization is extremely important to a user whose pri- GPU virtualization in Parallels Desktop 3.0, and the na- mary desktop runs inside a VM. tive GPU. We find that taking advantage of hardware GPUs pose a unique challenge in the field of virtu- acceleration significantly closes the gap between pure alization.