GRemote: API-Forwarding Powered Cloud Rendering

Abstract

Traditional GPU resource allocation approaches, widely adopted in today's data centers, only focus on the server-side functions while ignoring the client-side. These approaches waste client-side hardware resources. To solve this problem, remote API-forwarding architectures appear. Through running applications on the client-side, remote API-forwarding architectures offload some workloads to the client. However, many remote API-forwarding systems suffer from one big issue: shared-resource interference, stemming from two reasons: (a) GPU resource racing caused by resource overuse for a single client, and (b) CPU resource racing caused by resource shortage among clients. This paper presents gRemote, an open-source GPU-remoting system that can address this issue. To mitigate the CPU resource shortage, gRemote improves CPU configurations by expanding CPU resources from the server-side to both server- and client-side. To maintain the reasonable GPU usage for individual tasks, we innovate a new resource-sharing mechanism called GPU throttle. gRemote supports 1,228 OpenGL commands with around 10% shared-resource interference.