Turning GPUs into Floating Devices over the Cluster: The Beauty of GPU Migration

Virtualization techniques have shown to report benefits to data centers and other computing facilities. In this regard, not only virtual machines allow reducing the size of the computing infrastructure while increasing overall resource utilization but also virtualizing individual components of computers may provide significant benefits. This is the case, for example, for the remote GPU virtualization technique, implemented in several frameworks during the recent years. The large degree of flexibility provided by the remote GPU virtualization technique can, however, be further increased by applying the migration mechanism to it, so that the GPU part of applications can be live migrated to another GPU elsewhere in the cluster during execution time in a transparent way. In this paper we present a discussion about how the migration mechanism has been applied to different GPU virtualization frameworks. We also provide a big picture about the possibilities that migrating the GPU part of applications can provide to data centers and other computing facilities. We finally present the first results of an ongoing work consisting on applying the migration mechanism to the rCUDA remote GPU virtualization framework.