Graphics processing on HPC virtual applications

Abstract

Simulation, graphic design and other applications with high graphic processing needs have been taking advantage of high performance computing systems in order to deal with complex computations and massive volumes of data. These systems are usually built on top of a single operating system and rely on virtualization in order to run applications compiled for di erent ones. However graphics processing on virtual applications has performance and capability problems that are accentuated when these applications are run remotely. Therefore combination of virtualization and remote execution may produce important yield loss in graphics processing which is inappropriate for high performance computing. Furthermore this overhead can also produce big delays in screen updates which cannot be accepted in interactive applications. System designers need to choose the most appropriate architecture in order to gain the desired behavior and performance for their applications. Thus, this thesis performs an analysis on graphics processing performance with di erent operating systems, virtualization and remote desktop technologies that reveals their bottlenecks and limitations when working together. Moreover it analyses which technologies are more suitable for di erent scenarios based in applications needs and architecture constraints.