Improving the Efficiency of Future Exascale Systems with rCUDA

Abstract

The computing power of supercomputers and data centers has noticeably grown during the last decades at the cost of an ever increasing energy demand. The need for energy (and power) of these facilities has finally limited the evolution of high performance computing, making that many researchers are concerned not only about performance but also about energy efficiency. However, despite the many concerns about energy consumption, the search for computing power continues. In this regard, the research on exascale systems, able to deliver 10^18 floating point operations per second, has reached a widely consensus that these systems should operate within a maximum power budget of 20 megawatts. Many efficiency improvements are necessary for achieving this goal. One of these improvements is the usage of ARM low-power processors, as the Mont-Blanc proposes. In this paper we propose the combined use of ARM processors with the remote GPU virtualization rCUDA framework as a way to improve efficiency even more. Results show that it is possible to speed up applications by more than 12x when rCUDA is used to access high-end GPUs.