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Microsoft Readies Azure GPUs

virtualizationpractice.com

51–59 of 59 posts

Re: Microsoft Readies Azure GPUs

#51
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The GPUs that hosting providers are buying need to support vGPU features, which are only support by the higher-end workstation and server products.

Which is a software/binning issue (probably 100% software) not inherently HW because M60==GTX 980==GM204 and M40==GTX Titan X==Quadro M6000==GM200. Interestingly, for the first time ever, GP100 is unique (well, OK, K80 too but K80 was too late). And since Quadro P6000==Titan XP==GP102, it's probably just a software block here as well. Also, for the first time ever, the high-end Quadro will be the best FP32 GPU of it'…

It is a software/bios block. Once the driver grabs a desktop card and it's initiated it's locked. The cards also come with a UEFI bios which means if your host initialized the card during boot it's also locked.

To overcome this you need to disable UEFI boot/GPU boot in the BIOS and blacklist the card in the host OS and then create a PCI-stub device that will be used for the passthrough.

This is an utter and complete hack and you can't really use for production grade implementations.

I'm not sure that Quadro actually supports vGPU also AFAIK only Tesla and Grid parts do, Tesla does have some additional in GPU support for virtualization, i don't know how GRID handles it. GRID parts are less for compute and more for game/video streaming so they aren't fully virtualized, AFAIK they do not support P2P gpu communication or shared memory access, they are only more Hypervisor friendly so they can be thin provisioned.

Re: Microsoft Readies Azure GPUs

#52
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why Windows? You can run Linux on Azure

So... I haven't checked in the last 6 months but when I did do a comparison the Windows vms were noticably faster than the linux vms. I should check that again, it's been awhile. But it depends on your platform. Its an unpopular but somewhat verifiable fact that the Windows kernels have much more powerful async I/O support and when software targets that, it is very fast compared to linux counterparts. If your toolkit…

> Windows kernels have much more powerful async I/O

async DISK I/O

Re: Microsoft Readies Azure GPUs

#53
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So... I haven't checked in the last 6 months but when I did do a comparison the Windows vms were noticably faster than the linux vms. I should check that again, it's been awhile. But it depends on your platform. Its an unpopular but somewhat verifiable fact that the Windows kernels have much more powerful async I/O support and when software targets that, it is very fast compared to linux counterparts. If your toolkit…

> Windows kernels have much more powerful async I/O async DISK I/O

Network as well, under certain expectations.

Re: Microsoft Readies Azure GPUs

#55
post #2

Meanwhile Azure and Office 365 still use Symantec issued SHA1 certificates which are insecure, Symantec owns bluecoat who sell interception technologies to governments and private enterprises, all to convenient given that Microsoft themselves are a CA and could have issued their own certs, handing that off to a company like Symantec means they aren't directly giving your data away and are avoiding direct blame as muc…

Isn't Microsoft's CA used only to sign their software?

Re: Microsoft Readies Azure GPUs

#57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is a software/binning issue (probably 100% software) not inherently HW because M60==GTX 980==GM204 and M40==GTX Titan X==Quadro M6000==GM200. Interestingly, for the first time ever, GP100 is unique (well, OK, K80 too but K80 was too late). And since Quadro P6000==Titan XP==GP102, it's probably just a software block here as well. Also, for the first time ever, the high-end Quadro will be the best FP32 GPU of it'…

It is a software/bios block. Once the driver grabs a desktop card and it's initiated it's locked. The cards also come with a UEFI bios which means if your host initialized the card during boot it's also locked. To overcome this you need to disable UEFI boot/GPU boot in the BIOS and blacklist the card in the host OS and then create a PCI-stub device that will be used for the passthrough. This is an utter and complete…

Bare metal grid GPUs do support P2P. Xen breaks that on AWS.

Re: Microsoft Readies Azure GPUs

#58
post #29
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, check this one out: https://www.runabove.com/titan-x-gpu-servers.xml

That's nice, but the whole point of cloud instances is to be able to spin them up and down in large numbers when you need them, and pay by the hour

Or pay by the minute on Azure

Re: Microsoft Readies Azure GPUs

#59
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

""Gaming" GPU's have reduced compute capabilities" Not so for machine learning, at least in my experience. http://pjreddie.com/darknet/hardware-guide/ Passthrough: https://www.evonide.com/non-root-gpu-passthrough-setup/

You missed the end of the sentence: "....pretty horrible DP/HP compute performance compared to Tesla parts." Might not be applicable in your case, but NVIDIA hasn't released a desktop part with FP64 capabilities even remotely comparable to their Tesla's since the original Titan. Both Titan X's (Maxwell and Pascal) and the [Insert Physicist's Name Here] Quadros are pretty gimped as far as it comes to HP/DP operations.…

Agree with dharma1 that the FP32-based cloud services could be a lot useful for deep learning than the Tesla-based Clouds.

Baidu has actually built Titan X -based servers for themselves as they saw it as the most cost-efficient way to build the system: http://www.nextplatform.com/2016/04/22/baidu-eyes-deep-learn...

Same logic would probably work in "deep learning" clouds if there would not be the licensing issue.

And this conversation got immortalized to that slideshow as well for selecting hardware parts for deep learning systems: http://tinyurl.com/zzhj9vr

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