Giulio Giunta

A GPGPU transparent virtualization component for high performance computing clouds

The GPU Virtualization Service (gVirtuS) presented in this work tries to fill the gap between in-house hosted computing clusters, equipped with GPGPUs devices, and pay-for-use high performance virtual clusters deployed via public or private computing clouds. gVirtuS allows an instanced virtual machine to access GPGPUs in a transparent and hypervisor independent way, with an overhead slightly greater than a real machine/GPGPU setup. The performance of the components of gVirtuS is assessed through a suite of tests in different deployment scenarios, such as providing GPGPU power to cloud computing based HPC clusters and sharing remotely hosted GPGPUs among HPC nodes.

A GPU Accelerated High Performance Cloud Computing Infrastructure for Grid Computing Based Virtual Environmental Laboratory

Numerical models play a main role in the earth sciences, filling in the gap between experimental and theoretical approach. Nowadays, the computational approach is widely recognized as the complement to the scientific analysis. Meanwhile, the huge amount of observed/modelled data, and the need to store, process, and refine them, often makes the use of high performance parallel computing the only effective solution to ensure the effective usability of numerical applications, as in the field of atmospheric /oceanographic science, where the development of the Earth Simulator supercomputer [65] is just the edge. Grid Computing [38] is a key technology in all the computational sciences, allowing the use of inhomogeneous and geographically spread computational resources, shared across a virtual laboratory. Moreover, this technology offers several invaluable tools in ensuring security, performance, and availability of the applications. A large amount of simulation models have been successfully developed in the past, but a lot of them are poorly engineered and have been designed following a monolithic programming approach, unsuitable for a distributed computing environment or to be accelerated by GPGPUs [53]. The use of the grid computing technologies is often limited to computer science specialists, because of the complexity of grid itself and of its middleware. Another source of complexity resides on the use of coupled models, as, for example, in the case of atmosphere/seawave/ocean dynamics. The grid enabling approach could be hampered by the grid software and hardware infrastructure complexity. In this context, the build-up of a grid-aware virtual laboratory for environmental applications is a topical challenge for computer scientists. The term “e-Science” is usually referred to computationally enhanced science. With the rise of cloud computing technology and on-demand resource allocation, the meaning of eScience could straightforwardly change to elastic-Science. The aim of our virtual laboratory is to bridge the gap between the technology push of the high performance cloud computing and the pull of a wide range of scientific experimental applications. It provides generic functionalities supporting a wide class of specific e-Science application environments and

Virtualizing high-end GPGPUs on ARM clusters for the next generation of high performance cloud computing

High performance cloud computing is behind the scene powering “the next big thing” as the mainstream accelerator for innovation in many areas. We describe here how to accelerate inexpensive ARM-based computing nodes with high-end GPGPUs hosted on x86_64 machines using the GVirtuS general-purpose virtualization service. We draw the vision of a possible next generation computing clusters characterized by highly heterogeneous parallelism heading to a lower electric power demanding, less heat producing and more environmental friendliness. Preliminary but promising performance data suggest that this solution could be considered as part of the foundations of the next generation of high performance cloud computing components.

Virtualizing CUDA Enabled GPGPUs on ARM Clusters

The acceleration of inexpensive ARM-based computing nodes with high-end CUDA enabled GPGPUs hosted on x86 64 machines using the GVirtuS general-purpose virtualization service is a novel approach to hierarchical parallelism. In this paper we draw the vision of a possible hierarchical remote workload distribution among different devices. Preliminary, but promising, performance evaluation data suggests that the developed technology is suitable for real world applications.

On the Virtualization of CUDA Based GPU Remoting on ARM and X86 Machines in the GVirtuS Framework

The astonishing development of diverse and different hardware platforms is twofold: on one side, the challenge for the exascale performance for big data processing and management; on the other side, the mobile and embedded devices for data collection and human machine interaction. This drove to a highly hierarchical evolution of programming models. GVirtuS is the general virtualization system developed in 2009 and firstly introduced in 2010 enabling a completely transparent layer among GPUs and VMs. This paper shows the latest achievements and developments of GVirtuS, now supporting CUDA 6.5, memory management and scheduling. Thanks to the new and improved remoting capabilities, GVirtus now enables GPU sharing among physical and virtual machines based on x86 and ARM CPUs on local workstations, computing clusters and distributed cloud appliances.

Accelerating Linux and Android applications on low-power devices through remote GPGPU offloading

Low‐power devices are usually highly constrained in terms of CPU computing power, memory, and GPGPU resources for real‐time applications to run. In this paper, we describe RAPID, a complete framework suite for computation offloading to help low‐powered devices overcome these limitations. RAPID supports CPU and GPGPU computation offloading on Linux and Android devices. Moreover, the framework implements lightweight secure data transmission of the offloading operations. We present the architecture of the framework, showing the integration of the CPU and GPGPU offloading modules. We show by extensive experiments that the overhead introduced by the security layer is negligible. We present the first benchmark results showing that Java/Android GPGPU code offloading is possible. Finally, we show the adoption of the GPGPU offloading into BioSurveillance, a commercial real‐time face recognition application. The results show that, thanks to RAPID, BioSurveillance is being successfully adapted to run on low‐power devices. The proposed framework is highly modular and exposes a rich application programming interface to developers, making it highly versatile while hiding the complexity of the underlying networking layer.

Enabling Android-Based Devices to High-End GPGPUs

The success of Android is based on its unified Java programming model that allows to write platform-independent programs for a variety of different target platforms. In this paper we describe the first, to the best of our knowledge, offloading platform that enables Android devices with no GPU support to run Nvidia CUDA kernels by migrating their execution on high-end GPGPU servers. The framework is highly modular and exposes a rich Application Programming Interface (API) to the developers, making it highly transparent and hiding the complexity of the network layer. We present the first preliminary results, showing that not only GPGPU offloading is possible but it is also promising in terms of performance.

Performance, Resilience, and Security in Moving Data from the Fog to the Cloud: The DYNAMO Transfer Framework Approach

The data crowdsourcing paradigm applied in coastal and marine monitoring and management has been developed only recently due to the challenges of the marine environment. The pervasive internet of things technology is contributing to increase the number of connected instrumented devices available for data crowd-sourcing. A main issue in the fog/edge/cloud paradigm is that collected data need to be moved from tiny low power devices to cloud resources in order to be processed. This paper is about the DYNAMO data transfer framework enabling the data transfer feature in a internet of floating things scenario. The proposed framework is our solution to mitigate the effects of extreme and delay tolerant environments.