DS-CUDA: A Middleware to Use Many GPUs in the Cloud Environment

GPGPU (General-purpose computing on graphics processing units) has several difficulties when used in cloud environment, such as narrow bandwidth, higher cost, and lower security, compared with computation using only CPUs. Most high performance computing applications require huge communication between nodes, and do not fit a cloud environment, since network topology and its bandwidth are not fixed and they affect the performance of the application program. However, there are some applications for which little communication is needed, such as molecular dynamics (MD) simulation with the replica exchange method (REM). For such applications, we propose DS-CUDA (Distributed-shared compute unified device architecture), a middleware to use many GPUs in a cloud environment with lower cost and higher security. It virtualizes GPUs in a cloud such that they appear to be locally installed GPUs in a client machine. Its redundant mechanism ensures reliable calculation with consumer GPUs, which reduce the cost greatly. It also enhances the security level since no data except command and data for GPUs are stored in the cloud side. REM-MD simulation with 64 GPUs showed 58 and 36 times more speed than a locally-installed GPU via InfiniBand and the Internet, respectively.