Remember how 16GBs used to be an enterprise level database mainframe? Well, GPUs also have stupid amounts of compute on them. I have to imagine that there is some kind of database format that's useful with GPU compute attached. Since the data is already in VRAM, the GPU can sort, join, or otherwise manipulate data as needed.
Use your Nvidia GPU's VRAM as swap space on Linux
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Re: Use your Nvidia GPU's VRAM as swap space on Linux
#22Re: Use your Nvidia GPU's VRAM as swap space on Linux
#23> Built for laptops with soldered memory and no upgrade path. If you have an RTX card sitting there with 8GB of VRAM and you're getting swapped to SSD, this puts that VRAM to work. Well, that does at least answer my immediate question about why I would ever swap from expensive RAM to really expensive RAM:) Feels niche, but when you want it it's a good idea.
Edit: Although, this is predicated on the system being able to release VRAM that is acting as swap when it's time to start a game. Can it do that?
Re: Use your Nvidia GPU's VRAM as swap space on Linux
#24RAM disks have always fascinated me. In a different timeline every PC has a 100gb of RAM and 50TB HDDs are the norm.
Hard drives that huge scare me as it would take days to backup all the data off them.
Re: Use your Nvidia GPU's VRAM as swap space on Linux
#25Re: Use your Nvidia GPU's VRAM as swap space on Linux
#26Re: Use your Nvidia GPU's VRAM as swap space on Linux
#27Remember how 16GBs used to be an enterprise level database mainframe? Well, GPUs also have stupid amounts of compute on them. I have to imagine that there is some kind of database format that's useful with GPU compute attached. Since the data is already in VRAM, the GPU can sort, join, or otherwise manipulate data as needed.
I believe within 2-3 years databases and data warehouses on GPU will be common. The widespread use of agents to query data will be a part of this, as there will be a need to run far more queries at lower latency than needed for the ETL and BI workloads of the past.
Re: Use your Nvidia GPU's VRAM as swap space on Linux
#28Does anyone these days really use swap for anything than S4 suspend ?
This HN comment and the linked post brought up a lot of good points. The main takeaway is that swap should primarily be considered a mechanism for equality of reclamation, not for emergency extra memory, where equality of reclamation means file-backed pages and anonymous pages are subject to similar criteria for being evicted from physical memory.
I used to have zero swap on my Linux desktop and this convinced me to add at least a small swap partition.
Re: Use your Nvidia GPU's VRAM as swap space on Linux
#29Remember how 16GBs used to be an enterprise level database mainframe? Well, GPUs also have stupid amounts of compute on them. I have to imagine that there is some kind of database format that's useful with GPU compute attached. Since the data is already in VRAM, the GPU can sort, join, or otherwise manipulate data as needed.
Re: Use your Nvidia GPU's VRAM as swap space on Linux
#30Does anyone these days really use swap for anything than S4 suspend ?