Benchmarking virtualized NVIDIA GRID GPU cards using HPC methodologies! Don’t wear shiny green high-heels in the farmyard!

Follow GRID team’s @AmandaMSaunders and the adventures of the magical GRID shoes!

I’ve been cc:d on a clutch of strange enquiries recently where people are trying to evaluate the NVIDIA GRID GPU cards using HPC (High-performance computing) methods, benchmarks and comparisons. Hypervisors aren’t usually fully compatible with HPC application architecture and as such, although the newest NVIDIA Tesla cards (M60/M6) can be repurposed between a “compute mode” and a specialist “graphics” mode is provided for virtualized graphics designed with hypervisors and graphical application architecture in mind.

The previous (Kepler) generation of NVIDIAGPUs for virtualized graphics (GRID K1/K2) are designed solely for grahical workloads.

NVIDIA M60 GPUs – how they support CUDA, OpenCL and compute in “graphics” mode

Yesterday I wrote a blog about how to configure the M60 / M6 NVIDIA GPU boards for use for “graphics” mode or “compute” mode and how they were designed for different use cases such as VDI accelerated graphics and HPC (high-performance compute) respectively.

This has led to some questions as to whether “graphics” supports compute and CUDA like technologies. The answer is yes!

Mode switching on NVIDIA M60 (GRID 2.0) cards – modeswitch tool

Update (24th Feb 2016): Jason Southern has published an overview and how-to-guide on this tool: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VAQhiNNFXxQ&feature=youtu.be

 

I had an enquiry this week asking what the “modeswitch tool” is and when a user should use it. Basically a GRID 1.0 K1/K2 user had been to a demo of the new GRID 2.0 M60 GPUs. As he hadn’t got M60 boards yet he didn’t have the tool and hadn’t downloaded it (so hadn’t read the very comprehensive documentation that comes with it explain when and why to use it) but he’d remembered some information from the demo and was trying to extrapolate that to his GRID 1.0 K1/K2 cards.