SLURM Support for Remote GPU Virtualization: Implementation and Performance Study

© 2014 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.SLURM is a resource manager that can be leveraged to share a collection of heterogeneous resources among the jobs in execution in a cluster. However, SLURM is not designed to handle resources such as graphics processing units (GPUs). Concretely, although SLURM can use a generic resource plugin (GRes) to manage GPUs, with this solution the hardware accelerators can only be accessed by the job that is in execution on the node to which the GPU is attached. This is a serious constraint for remote GPU virtualization technologies, which aim at providing a user-transparent access to all GPUs in cluster, independently of the specific location of the node where the application is running with respect to the GPU node. In this work we introduce a new type of device in SLURM, "rgpu", in order to gain access from any application node to any GPU node in the cluster using rCUDA as the remote GPU virtualization solution. With this new scheduling mechanism, a user can access any number of GPUs, as SLURM schedules the tasks taking into account all the graphics accelerators available in the complete cluster. We present experimental results that show the benefits of this new approach in terms of increased flexibility for the job scheduler.The researchers at UPV were supported by the the Generalitat Valenciana under Grant PROMETEOII/2013/009 of the PROMETEO program phase II. Researchers at UJI were supported by MINECO, by FEDER funds under Grant TIN2011-23283, and by the Fundacion Caixa-Castelló Bancaixa (Grant P11B2013-21).Iserte Agut, S.; Castello Gimeno, A.; Mayo Gual, R.; Quintana Ortí, ES.; Silla Jiménez, F.; Duato Marín, JF.; Reaño González, C.... (2014). SLURM Support for Remote GPU Virtualization: Implementation and Performance Study. En Computer Architecture and High Performance Computing (SBAC-PAD), 2014 IEEE 26th International Symposium on. IEEE. 318-325. https://doi.org/10.1109/SBAC-PAD.2014.49S31832

Improving the management efficiency of GPU workloads in data centers through GPU virtualization

[EN] Graphics processing units (GPUs) are currently used in data centers to reduce the execution time of compute-intensive applications. However, the use of GPUs presents several side effects, such as increased acquisition costs and larger space requirements. Furthermore, GPUs require a nonnegligible amount of energy even while idle. Additionally, GPU utilization is usually low for most applications. In a similar way to the use of virtual machines, using virtual GPUs may address the concerns associated with the use of these devices. In this regard, the remote GPU virtualization mechanism could be leveraged to share the GPUs present in the computing facility among the nodes of the cluster. This would increase overall GPU utilization, thus reducing the negative impact of the increased costs mentioned before. Reducing the amount of GPUs installed in the cluster could also be possible. However, in the same way as job schedulers map GPU resources to applications, virtual GPUs should also be scheduled before job execution. Nevertheless, current job schedulers are not able to deal with virtual GPUs. In this paper, we analyze the performance attained by a cluster using the remote Compute Unified Device Architecture middleware and a modified version of the Slurm scheduler, which is now able to assign remote GPUs to jobs. Results show that cluster throughput, measured as jobs completed per time unit, is doubled at the same time that the total energy consumption is reduced up to 40%. GPU utilization is also increased.Generalitat Valenciana, Grant/Award Number: PROMETEO/2017/077; MINECO and FEDER, Grant/Award Number: TIN2014-53495-R, TIN2015-65316-P and TIN2017-82972-RIserte, S.; Prades, J.; Reaño González, C.; Silla, F. (2021). Improving the management efficiency of GPU workloads in data centers through GPU virtualization. Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience. 33(2):1-16. https://doi.org/10.1002/cpe.5275S11633

Integer Programming Based Heterogeneous CPU-GPU Cluster Scheduler for SLURM Resource Manager

We present an integer programming based heterogeneous CPU-GPU cluster scheduler for the widely used SLURM resource manager. Our scheduler algorithm takes windows of jobs and solves an allocation problem in which free CPU cores and GPU cards are allocated collectively to jobs so as to maximize some objective function. We perform realistic SLURM emulation tests using the Effective System Performance (ESP) workloads. The test results show that our scheduler produces better resource utilization and shorter average job waiting times. The SLURM scheduler plug-in that implements our algorithm is available at http://code.google.com/p/slurm-ipsched/