Low-Level Frame-Buffer Scraping for GPUs in the Cloud

We describe and evaluate a software-only implementation of a novel mechanism for accessing and streaming GPU-rendered content from the cloud to low-end user devices. The unique properties of our implementation enable the trivial cloud-deployment of graphics-intensive applications, even ones that were not originally intended to run in the cloud. We achieve this goal by creating virtual GPU nodes that appear to the application like hardware devices, but that do not incur the overhead of virtualization. The low-level access to the frame buffer maximizes the number of applications that work out-of-the-box without the system imposing any specific display manager or windowing system. We call this property application transparency. To our knowledge, no other software-only system achieves this level of transparency.