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GpuScan and SSD-To-GPU Direct DMA

kaigai.hatenablog.com

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Re: GpuScan and SSD-To-GPU Direct DMA

#6
There is no explanation how it works. Does it work on top of existing APIs in user space? Or is there a custom kernel driver bypassing user space?

I've done some high throughput streaming from HD/SSD to GPU before, and it's pretty easy to beat the naive solution but getting the most out of it would require kernel space code.

I was doing random access streaming of textures using memory mapped files for input and copying to persistent/coherent mapped pixel buffers on the CPU with memcpy with background threads. This was intended to take advantage of the buffer caches (works great when a page is reused) and intended for random access. If I would have been working on a sequential/full file upload, my solution would be entirely different.

Edit: here's the source: https://github.com/kaigai/ssd2gpu

It has a custom kernel module.

Re: GpuScan and SSD-To-GPU Direct DMA

#9
post #7

See also https://developer.nvidia.com/gpudirect and to some extent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NVLink . NVLink is in the Power9 servers Google is using.

AFAIK Intel is stonewalling NVLink on their CPUs so they can (try to) sell Knight's landing. Quite a shame, although it might hurt then in the long run if they drive more institutes to buy ARM plus Tesla or Power plus Tesla clusters.
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