USENIX ATC '24 and OSDI '24

Yicheng Gu, Yun Wang, Yunfan Sun, Yuxin Xiang, Yufan Jiang, Xuyan Hu, Zhengwei Qi, and Haibing Guan, Shanghai Jiao Tong University

Ray tracing rendering technology enhances scene realism and offers immersive experiences. However, it demands significant computational resources to trace and compute light-object interactions. As a result, traditional local GPU rendering might not meet the demands for high image quality and low latency. Moreover, many applications are tailored to utilize the resources of a single GPU, limiting their capacity to increase computational power through additional GPUs.

This paper presents gVulkan, the first transparent multi-GPU acceleration rendering solution for Vulkan-based ray tracing. To address the bottleneck caused by limited local GPU resources, gVulkan can offload ray tracing rendering to the cloud via API-forwarding. In the cloud, gVulkan employs Split Frame Rendering (SFR) to enable an arbitrary number of GPUs to accelerate rendering in parallel, while dynamically self-rebalancing the workload at a pixel-grained level across GPUs. Experiments demonstrate that gVulkan can accelerate Vulkan-based ray tracing programs in an application-unaware manner. By dynamically rebalancing each GPU's workload, gVulkan achieves good linearity with 3.81× speedup across 4 GPUs on average.

https://www.usenix.org/conference/atc24/presentation/gu-yicheng