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] Published in the USENIX Workshop on I/O Virtualization 2008, Industrial Practice session. Abstract limited documentation. Modern high-end GPUs have more transistors, draw Modern graphics co-processors (GPUs) can produce more power, and offer at least an order of magnitude high fidelity images several orders of magnitude faster more computational performance than CPUs. At the than general purpose CPUs, and this performance expec- same time, GPU acceleration has extended beyond en- tation is rapidly becoming ubiquitous in personal com- tertainment (e.g., games and video) into the basic win- puters. Despite this, GPU virtualization is a nascent field dowing systems of recent operating systems and is start- of research. This paper introduces a taxonomy of strate- ing to be applied to non-graphical high-performance ap- gies for GPU virtualization and describes in detail the plications including protein folding, financial modeling, specific GPU virtualization architecture developed for and medical image processing. The rise in applications VMware’s hosted products (VMware Workstation and that exploit, or even assume, GPU acceleration makes VMware Fusion). it increasingly important to expose the physical graph- We analyze the performance of our GPU virtualiza- ics hardware in virtualized environments. Additionally, tion with a combination of applications and microbench- virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) initiatives have led marks. We also compare against software rendering, the many enterprises to try to simplify their desktop man- GPU virtualization in Parallels Desktop 3.0, and the na- agement by delivering VMs to their users.