vAccel now available on Firecracker

Today, Nubificus LTD introduced vAccel support on AWS Firecracker, opening the door for enabling hardware acceleration for serverless computing.

With a slim design and precise abstractions, vAccel semantically exposes hardware acceleration features to users with little to no knoweldge of software acceleration framework internals.

Serverless computing workflows are now able to enjoy compute-offload mechanisms to provide AI/ML services as functions, triggered thousands or millions of times by events, on-demand, auto-scaling to multiple physical and virtual nodes.

The core of vAccel is the runtime system, essentially a library, that translates complicated compute frameworks to meaningful functions that users can directly call. These frameworks, commonly used on hardware accelerators, such as TensorRT, Tensorflow, Jetson-inference, or even lower-level abstractions such as CUDA, OpenCL, OpenACC, are now easily usable by the end-user via vAccel. Moreover, vAccel offers a virtualization backend, facilitating the execution of functions on Virtual Machines. Apart from support for AWS Firecracker, QEMU/KVM support is also availabe.

End-users can get a sneak peek at what vAccel on AWS Firecracker has to offer on the project’s website, on github, or on-prem, by using the distributed binaries, or just a container image. To get started, follow one of the tutorials currently available at https://blog.cloudkernels.net