[Openstack-operators] How are folks providing GPU instance types?

Nordquist, Peter L Peter.Nordquist at pnnl.gov
Mon May 9 22:50:54 UTC 2016


This page [0] is not up to date but you can use it for configuration examples or at least that's what I've done.  I started this process in Liberty and then migrated to Mitaka and while I have successfully passed in a device to a VM from Nova, I have not tried to initialize or use that device yet since I don't have any EFI images yet.  In Liberty I found that Nova comes with all of the functionality already to do pci passthrough given you have your Hypervisor configured correctly.  Some of it has changed in Mitaka like needing to set type on the alias and including support to boot EFI images but in general it is close.  I think the filter is already included in the list of available filters so you would just have to add it to your default filter list.  I'm not sure you would even have to setup host aggregates, just new flavors that define what aliases that flavor is going to allocate.  My assumption has been that scheduling other VMs on a GPU node might starve the GPU flavor from being able to launch on that node but I have not tried it yet.
 
Here's some example configuration:
pci_alias={"name": "Tesla_K80", "vendor_id": "10de", "product_id": "102d", "device_type": "type-PCI"}
pci_passthrough_whitelist={"vendor_id": "10de", "product_id": "102d"}

The API parts of that webpage currently seem to be integrated in the Nova codebase but not enabled.  You can use the Nova database itself to check for the pci devices in the pci_devices table.

You will also have to enable iommu on your hypervisors to have libvirt expose the capability to Nova for PCI passthrough.  I use Centos 7 and had to set 'iommu=pt intel_iommu=on' for my kernel parameters.  Along with this, you'll have to start using EFI for your VMs by installing OVMF on your Hypervisors and configuring your images appropriately.  I don't have a link handy for this but the gist is that Legacy bootloaders have a much more complicated process to initialize the devices being passed to the VM where EFI is much easier.

[0]: https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Pci_passthrough 

Peter Nordquist

-----Original Message-----
From: Jonathan Proulx [mailto:jon at csail.mit.edu] 
Sent: Monday, May 09, 2016 13:13
To: openstack-operators at lists.openstack.org
Subject: [Openstack-operators] How are folks providing GPU instance types?

Hi All,

Having trouble finding any current info on best practices for providing GPU instances.  Most of what Google is feeding me is Grizzly or older.

I'm currently on Kilo (Mitaka upgrade planned in 60-90 days) with
Ubuntu14.04 and kvm hypervisor.  Looking to add some NVidia GPUs but haven't invested in hardware yet.  Presumably I'd be using host aggregates and instance metadata to separate these out from the general pool so not tied to kvm though it would be nice to have image compatibility across GPU and nonGPU instance types (this is currently 'raw' images in ceph rbd).

Any pointers to good info online or general advice as I travel down this path?  I suppose particularly urgent is any hardware caveats I need ot be aware of before I sink cash into the wrong thing (I'm presuming that the k10,k20,k40,k80 are all equivalent in this regard).

-Jon

-- 

_______________________________________________
OpenStack-operators mailing list
OpenStack-operators at lists.openstack.org
http://lists.openstack.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/openstack-operators



More information about the OpenStack-operators mailing list