09.251.2015 - Using nVidia GPGPU Compute Acceleration with ESX 6.0

As was mentioned in a previous blog post , accelerator cards are becoming increasingly common in HPC environments and so it is important that we assess the performance of such cards with ESX. Thank you very much to Na Zhang for all of her work on the following. In this post, we share the results of running the Scalable HeterOgeneous Computing ( SHOC ) benchmark and a CUDA-enabled version of the LAMMPS molecular dynamic program on ESX 6.0. We used a loaner nVidia Grid K2 card for this test to demonstrate how closely we can approximate bare-metal performance. The demonstrated results are relevant to HPC users despite the fact that such users will most often use higher-end K40 and K80 cards instead. As you can see in the Figure, ESX 6.0u1 delivers very close to bare-metal performance in all SHOC benchmark categories except those in which data transfer speed is the determining factor. In those cases, we see up to a 20% drop in performance relative to bare-metal. However, using an engineering build of ESX (“Testbuild”) that includes support for Intel VT-d large pages, we see that these performance drops can be completely addressed, restoring bare-metal performance in these cases. Moving beyond low-level benchmarks, we also examined LAMMPS performance when it [...]

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