Re: Direct access to GPGPU do-able?

[Weidong Han <weidong.han@intel.com>]

Carsten Aulbert wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I'll start with a one-off question here, so please cc me on the reply. 
>
> We are running a largish cluster and are currently buying GPGPU systems (Tesla 
> and soon Fermi based). We will have at least 2 possibly 4 of these cards per 
> box and have the problem that some codes need different CUDA kernel drivers to 
> run. As these boxes have 4 CPU cores, 12 GB of memory and CPU-VT support we 
> thought that this might be solvable by creating (para-) virtualized guests on 
> the boxes and passing one GPGPU device into a guest at a time. In there we 
> then can run any kernel/driver combo necessary.
>
> But since my current virtualization experience only stretches to OpenVZ and 
> VirtualBox (tinkering with Xen a couple of years back), I don't know if KVM is 
> the right approach here. We need something which we can automatically set-up 
> via CLI, i.e. starting and stopping the guests need to be fully automatic, we 
> don't need a graphical environment within the guests, just plain text is good 
> enough.
>
> What do you think, is looking at KVM the right choice for this? Can we pass a 
> device directly into a guest?
>   
KVM already supports device assignment (e.g. NIC) to guest, but graphics 
card assignment is not supported yet.

Federico, you said you were porting xen graphics assignment patches to 
kvm, what's your progress?

Regards,
Weidong

> Cheers
>
> Carsten
>
>