Supporting High Performance Molecular Dynamics in Virtualized Clusters using IOMMU, SR-IOV, and GPUDirect

Abstract

Cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service paradigms have recently shown their utility for a vast array of computational problems, ranging from advanced web service architectures to high throughput computing. However, many scientific computing applications have been slow to adapt to virtualized cloud frameworks. This is due to performance impacts of virtualization technologies, coupled with the lack of advanced hardware support necessary for running many high performance scientific applications at scale. By using KVM virtual machines that leverage both Nvidia GPUs and InfiniBand, we show that molecular dynamics simulations with LAMMPS and HOOMD run at near-native speeds. This experiment also illustrates how virtualized environments can support the latest parallel computing paradigms, including both MPI+CUDA and new GPUDirect RDMA functionality. Specific findings show initial promise in scaling of such applications to larger production deployments targeting large scale computational workloads.