System Virtualization for Neural Processing Units

Modern cloud platforms have been employing hardware accelerators such as neural processing units (NPUs) to meet the increasing demand for computing resources for AI-based application services. However, due to the lack of system virtualization support, the current way of using NPUs in cloud platforms suffers from either low resource utilization or poor isolation between multi-tenant application services. In this paper, we investigate the system virtualization techniques for NPUs across the entire software and hardware stack, and present our NPU virtualization solution named NeuCloud. We propose a flexible NPU abstraction named vNPU that allows fine-grained NPU virtualization and resource management. We leverage this abstraction and design the vNPU allocation, mapping, and scheduling policies to maximize the resource utilization, while achieving both performance and security isolation for vNPU instances at runtime.