Sharing Computing Resources with Virtual Machines by Transparent Data Access

Cloud computing has rapid growth in enterprise and academic areas. Computing platform makes up the transition from physical servers to virtual machines (VMs) in the cloud. Instead of many advantages, VMs remain several problems to employ effective utilization of physical computing resources, especially many-core accelerators. Even though GPGPU is a hopeful solution for high-load applications, existing methods to utilize GPUs from VMs are subjected to various restraints. In order to solve this problem, we propose a flexible method to share external computing resources by providing transparent access for data in the VMs. By committing commands to a computing host which processes the jobs as substitution, VMs can process high load jobs as necessary even if the VM has a tiny configuration. The computing host mounts the working directories in the VMs and enqueues jobs committed by the VMs. Experimental results show that the overhead of our implementation is sufficiently small in the low I/O load processes.