GPU Computing in EGI Environment Using a Cloud Approach

Recently GPU computing, namely the possibility to use the vector processors of graphics card as computational general purpose units of High Performance Computing environments, has generated considerable interest in the scientific community. Some communities in European Grid Infrastructure (EGI) are reshaping their applications to exploit this new programming paradigm. Each EGI community, called Virtual Organization (VO), often requires specific environments, making necessary for each Grid site to enable an efficient system to fulfill VO's software requirements. Cloud Computing and more generally the opportunity to transparently use computational resources, together with the consolidation of virtualization technologies, allows to provide to the end users the required environment for their activities. The present work is aimed at exploring the possibilities to provide for each VO an on-demand GPU environment (GPU framework, Operating System and libraries) and making it accessible via the EGI infrastructure using a Cloud approach.