LinuxCon ContainerCon CloudOpen China

Containers are widely used to deploy applications. In the meantime, more and more applications (e.g. big data processing, deep learning) are trying to use specialized hardware accelerators to improve performance (including lots of CT products in Huawei). However, the lack of accelerator support in containers make it hard to achieve both easier deployment and better performance. In this presentation, Jiuyue will introduce a plugin mechanism for container to bridge this gap. In this mechanism, accelerator plugins are shipped with drivers by vendors, users do not need to install drivers or libraries inside container, which make the images portable. The users only need to specify the required accelerator runtime environment when build the image. The container engine will take care of all the rest things. The detailed design and a Docker based prototype will be discussed in this presentation.