Transparent Accelerator Migration in a Virtualized GPU Environment

This paper presents a framework to support transparent, live migration of virtual GPU accelerators in a virtualized execution environment. Migration is a critical capability in such environments because it provides support for fault tolerance, on-demand system maintenance, resource management, and load balancing in the mapping of virtual to physical GPUs. Techniques to increase responsiveness and reduce migration overhead are explored. The system is evaluated by using four application kernels and is demonstrated to provide low migration overheads. Through transparent load balancing, our system provides a speedup of 1.7 to 1.9 for three of the four application kernels.