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Call it real : Virtual GPUs in Nova

HPC / GPU / AI

GPUs in OpenStack? It’s a long-standing question. There are many business cases for providing high-profile GPUs for every instance—namely AI, mining, and desktop. Until Queens, the only solution to expose these devices to the guests was PCI passthrough in Nova—effective, but wasteful in terms of resources.

In this session, we’ll show you how, as of Queens, you can request virtual GPUs (vGPUs) for the libvirt/KVM Nova driver. We'll share how the feature was discussed in the Nova community to integrate with the new Placement service, as well as how very different Nova drivers (Xen and libvirt/KVM) were able to cooperate to implement a major feature. We'll also discuss current feature limitations, and share the roadmap for the next releases.

What can I expect to learn?

The purpose of this talk is twice :

from an operator point of view, they can evaluate the possibility to allow end-users to have high-profile virtualized graphic cards within their instances and how to configure Nova in order to make that possible. The talk will also focus on all the existing possibilities for instances to get attached graphical cards, and how the new feature can fill a gap.
from a Nova developer point of view, that talk will also focus on the design stage and how the Nova community as a whole (and not only single virt driver teams) considered the problem and discussed on an implementation. The talk will also present the key points to do if you want to implement a large feature that spans multiple Nova virt drivers, and in particular will stress on testing and documentation.

Monday, May 21, 3:10pm-3:50pm (10:10pm - 10:50pm UTC)

Vancouver Convention Centre West - Level Three - Room 301

Slides: Call it real : Virtual GPUs in Nova

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Difficulty Level: Intermediate

Tags: Demo Upstream Development Nova Technical Arch / Ops Xen KVM

Sylvain Bauza

Red Hat

Sylvain currently works as a Senior Software Engineer at Red Hat mainly dedicated on Nova (Compute), is one of the maintainers (called nova-core) and now the Nova Project Technical Lead since Yoga. His love story with OpenStack began in 2012 as an operator/deployer running Diablo, but as he was too busy to chase and fix bugs, he decided to create some by himself. When he has (unfortunately not... FULL PROFILE