ACADEMIA

Zillians announced the availability of vGPU - the world's first commercial virtualization solution for decoupling GPU hardware from software. Traditionally, physical GPUs must reside on the same machine running GPU code. This severely hampers GPU cloud deployment due to the difficulty of dynamic GPU provisioning. With vGPU technology, bulky hardware is no longer a limiting factor. vGPU introduces a thin, transparent RPC layer between local application and remote GPU, enabling existing GPU software to run without any modification on a remote GPU resource.

Utilizing Mellanox Technologies InfiniBand RDMA I/O solutions and NVDIA GPUDirect technology, Zillians vGPU achieved peak data transfer rates between application and GPU hardware. This opens the door to a broader range of GPU applications that can take advantage of virtualized GPU resources, and also a boon for service providers or cloud operators looking to deploy next generation cloud services based on scalable GPU and Infiniband technologies. As interest in GPU-based HPC clusters continues to grow, vGPU represents a critical enabler for systems to realize resource sharing and improve system utilization across a variety of application domains.

"We are excited to collaborate with Zillians to provide new capabilities for high-performance and massive multi-player online gaming cloud platforms," said Gilad Shainer, Senior Director, Market Development at Mellanox Technologies. "Mellanox InfiniBand I/O solutions with native RDMA support and GPU acceleration provide the essential technology for Zillians' innovative vGPU solution."

Availability
Zillians vGPU is now available for early evaluation request. Version 1.0 featuring support for NVIDIA CUDA 4.0 runtime and driver APIs will be released by the end of 2011. Version 2.0 featuring further support for OpenCL 1.1 is scheduled for release in 2012 Q1.