Enable Ascend Virtualization¶

Ascend virtualization is divided into dynamic virtualization and static virtualization. This document describes how to enable and use Ascend static virtualization capabilities.

Prerequisites¶

Setup of Kubernetes cluster environment.
The current NPU node has the Ascend driver installed.
The current NPU node has the Ascend-Docker-Runtime component installed.
The NPU MindX DL suite is installed on the current cluster.
Supported NPU models:
- Ascend 310P, verified
- Ascend 910b (20 cores), verified
- Ascend 910 (32 cores), officially supported but not verified
- Ascend 910 (30 cores), officially supported but not verified
For more details, refer to the official virtualization hardware documentation.

Refer to the Ascend NPU Component Installation Documentation for the basic environment setup.

Enable Virtualization Capabilities¶

To enable virtualization capabilities, you need to manually modify the startup parameters of the ascend-device-plugin-daemonset component. Refer to the following command:

- device-plugin -useAscendDocker=true -volcanoType=false -presetVirtualDevice=true
- logFile=/var/log/mindx-dl/devicePlugin/devicePlugin.log -logLevel=0

Split VNPU Instances¶

Static virtualization requires manually splitting VNPU instances. Refer to the following command:

npu-smi set -t create-vnpu -i 13 -c 0 -f vir02

i refers to the card id.
c refers to the chip id.
vir02 refers to the split specification template.

Card id and chip id can be queried using npu-smi info. The split specifications can be found in the Ascend official templates.

After splitting the instance, you can query the split results using the following command:

npu-smi info -t info-vnpu -i 13 -c 0

The query result is as follows:

vnpu1

Restart `ascend-device-plugin-daemonset`¶

After splitting the instance, manually restart the device-plugin pod, then use the kubectl describe command to check the resources of the registered node:

kubectl describe node {{nodename}}

vnpu2

How to Use the Device¶

When creating an application, specify the resource key as shown in the following YAML:

......
resources:
  requests:
    huawei.com/Ascend310P-2c: 1
  limits:
    huawei.com/Ascend310P-2c: 1
......