CUDA acceleration for Xen virtual machines in infiniband clusters with rCUDA

Many data centers currently use virtual machines (VMs) to achieve a more efficient usage of hardware resources. However, current virtualization solutions, such as Xen, do not easily provide graphics processing unit (GPU) accelerators to applications running in the virtualized domain with the flexibility usually required in data centers (i.e., managing virtual GPU instances and concurrently sharing them among several VMs). Remote GPU virtualization frameworks such as the rCUDA solution may address this problem.
In this work we analyze the use of the rCUDA framework to accelerate scientific applications running inside Xen VMs. Results show that the use of the rCUDA framework is a feasible approach, featuring a very low overhead if an InfiniBand fabric is already present in the cluster.