The International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis
The International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis
Workshop: 13th International Workshop on Runtime and Operating Systems for Supercomputers (ROSS)
Authors: Niklas Eiling, Martin Kröning, Jonathan Klimt, Philipp Fensch, Stefan Lankes, and Antonello Monti (RWTH Aachen University)
Abstract: To achieve maximum performance on current heterogeneous architectures, applications have to be tailored to the available hardware by using special APIs to interact with the hardware resources, such as the CUDA APIs for NVIDIA GPUs. Simultaneously, unikernels emerge as a solution for the increasing overhead introduced by the complexity of modern operating systems and their inability to optimize for specific application profiles. Despite this, there is a lack of support for using GPUs in unikernels. We propose using Cricket GPU virtualization to introduce GPU support to the unikernels RustyHermit and Unikraft. To interface with Cricket, we implement a generic library for using ONC RPCs in Rust. With Cricket and our RPC library, unikernels are able to use GPU resources, even when they are installed in remote machines. This way, we enable the use of unikernels for applications that require the high parallel performance of GPUs to achieve manageable execution times.