rCUDA, which stands for Remote CUDA, is a type of

middleware Middleware is a type of computer software program that provides services to software applications beyond those available from the operating system. It can be described as "software glue". Middleware makes it easier for software developers to imple ...

software framework for remote

GPU A graphics processing unit (GPU) is a specialized electronic circuit designed for digital image processing and to accelerate computer graphics, being present either as a discrete video card or embedded on motherboards, mobile phones, personal ...

virtualization. Fully compatible with the

CUDA In computing, CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture) is a proprietary parallel computing platform and application programming interface (API) that allows software to use certain types of graphics processing units (GPUs) for accelerated gene ...

application programming interface (

API An application programming interface (API) is a connection between computers or between computer programs. It is a type of software interface, offering a service to other pieces of software. A document or standard that describes how to build ...

), it allows the allocation of one or more CUDA-enabled GPUs to a single application. Each GPU can be part of a

cluster may refer to: Science and technology Astronomy * Cluster (spacecraft), constellation of four European Space Agency spacecraft * Cluster II (spacecraft), a European Space Agency mission to study the magnetosphere * Asteroid cluster, a small ...

or running inside of a

virtual machine In computing, a virtual machine (VM) is the virtualization or emulator, emulation of a computer system. Virtual machines are based on computer architectures and provide the functionality of a physical computer. Their implementations may involve ...

. The approach is aimed at improving performance in GPU clusters that are lacking full utilization. GPU virtualization reduces the number of GPUs needed in a cluster, and in turn, leads to a lower cost configuration – less energy, acquisition, and maintenance. The recommended distributed acceleration architecture is a

high performance computing High-performance computing (HPC) is the use of supercomputers and computer clusters to solve advanced computation problems. Overview HPC integrates systems administration (including network and security knowledge) and parallel programming into ...

cluster with GPUs attached to only a few of the cluster nodes. When a node without a local

executes an application needing GPU resources, remote execution of the

kernel Kernel may refer to: Computing * Kernel (operating system), the central component of most operating systems * Kernel (image processing), a matrix used for image convolution * Compute kernel, in GPGPU programming * Kernel method, in machine learnin ...

is supported by data and code transfers between local system memory and remote GPU memory. rCUDA is designed to accommodate this client-server architecture. On one end, clients employ a library of wrappers to the high-level CUDA Runtime API, and on the other end, there is a network listening service that receives requests on a

TCP port The Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) is one of the main protocols of the Internet protocol suite. It originated in the initial network implementation in which it complemented the Internet Protocol (IP). Therefore, the entire suite is common ...

. Several nodes running different GPU-accelerated applications can concurrently make use of the whole set of accelerators installed in the cluster. The client forwards the request to one of the servers, which accesses the GPU installed in that computer and executes the request in it. Time-multiplexing the GPU, or in other words ''sharing'' it, is accomplished by spawning different server processes for each remote GPU execution request.

rCUDA v20.07

The rCUDA middleware enables the concurrent usage of CUDA-compatible devices remotely. rCUDA employs either the InfiniBand network or the socket API for the communication between clients and servers. rCUDA can be useful in three different environments: * Clusters. To reduce the number of GPUs installed in High Performance Clusters. This leads to energy savings, as well as other related savings like acquisition costs, maintenance, space, cooling, etc. * Academia. In commodity networks, to offer access to a few high performance GPUs concurrently to many students. * Virtual Machines. To enable the access to the CUDA facilities on the physical machine. The current version of rCUDA (v20.07) supports CUDA version 9.0, excluding graphics interoperability. rCUDA v20.07 targets the Linux OS (for 64-bit architectures) on both client and server sides. CUDA applications do not need any change in their source code in order to be executed with rCUDA.

References

External links

Nvidia CUDA Official site
{{lowercase Software frameworks GPGPU Computer libraries Middleware System software Cloud platforms Cloud computing Distributed computing architecture Distributed computing Parallel computing