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It would seem that rationalization would fall apart quickly with the new Power CPUs that have NVLink built right into the CPU. Getting data back and forth shou
by tw04 10y ago
It would seem that rationalization would fall apart quickly with the new Power CPUs that have NVLink built right into the CPU. Getting data back and forth shouldn't be a problem anymore.
Outside of CPU >> GPU, I'm not sure what other data movement you could be talking about. A SAS HBA or Ethernet NIC or Infiniband HBA are almost always going to be operating over the same PCIe bus the GPU uses. In the rare instances they're built onto the CPU, the "network link" is likely going to still be significantly slower than the fastest PCIe slot.
- marcell 10y agoWhat is NVLink, and what does it mean in terms of data transfer?
- fulafel 10y agoIt's a faster link between between future IBM POWER processors and NVidia GPUs, but won't make waves in database market since those systems are niche HPC/supercomputing hardware.
- jzelinskie 10y agoI've also seen NVLink on some of the pre-Pascal roadmaps for nVidia's gaming-oriented graphics cards. Since the current generation gaming consoles has HSA, I'm hoping that it gains in popularity and because less niche. Problem is that it'd be a pretty vital component to be nVidia proprietary.
- snuxoll 10y agoCAPI is "open" solution to do the same thing, though NVLink supposedly still offers more bandwidth. Unfortunately CAPI is only available on POWER8 hardware at the moment and I'm not sure if IBM is open to license it beyond OpenPOWER - still, there's a decent number of CAPI-capable cards already available and more coming to the market in the future. GPU's may not be great for every unit of work a RDBMS has to perform, but given their ability to rapidly compute hashes it could help a lot with joins (as evidenced by PGStrom).
- escap 10y agohttp://www.nvidia.com/object/nvlink.html http://www.nvidia.com/object/nvlink.html - NVIDIA® NVLink™ is a high-bandwidth, energy-efficient interconnect that enables ultra-fast communication between the CPU and GPU, and between GPUs. And a big on the PowerPC roadmap http://www.nextplatform.com/2016/04/07/ibm-unfolds-power-chip-roadmap-past-2020/ http://www.nextplatform.com/2016/04/07/ibm-unfolds-power-chi... "With NVLink, multiple GPUs can be linked by 20 GB/sec links (bi-directional at that speed) to each other or to the Power8 processor so they can share data more rapidly than is possible over PCI-Express 3.0 peripheral links. (Those PCI-Express links top out at 16 GB/sec and, unlike NVLink, they cannot be aggregated to boost the bandwidth between two devices.)"
- valarauca1 10y ago>It would seem that rationalization would fall apart quickly with the new Power CPUs that have NVLink NVLink has 80GB/s [1]. DDR4 quad channel (Xeon Servers) has ~120GB/s [2]. So no this rationalization doesn't fall apart. Furthermore in the event NVLink gets faster then RAM, then you'll still be bottlenecked by RAM access, as you'll buffer here. This of course is ignoring weird systems where you attempt to maintain ACID coherence of tables between GPU, CPU, and Disk memory. But then GPU memory size become inherently limiting as even the biggest max out at ~32GB. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NVLink https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NVLink [2] http://www.corsair.com/en-us/blog/2014/september/ddr3_vs_ddr4_synthetic http://www.corsair.com/en-us/blog/2014/september/ddr3_vs_ddr... (2channel -> 4channel x2)
- valarauca1 10y ago>It would seem that rationalization would fall apart quickly with the new Power CPUs that have NVLink NVLink has 80GB/s [1]. DDR4 quad channel (Xeon Servers) has ~120GB/s [2]. So no this rationalization doesn't fall apart. Furthermore in the event NVLink gets faster then RAM, then you'll still be bottlenecked by RAM access, as you'll buffer here. This of course is ignoring weird systems where you attempt to maintain ACID coherence of tables between GPU, CPU, and Disk memory. But then GPU memory size become inherently limiting as even the biggest max out at ~32GB. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NVLink https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NVLink [2] http://www.corsair.com/en-us/blog/2014/september/ddr3_vs_ddr4_synthetic http://www.corsair.com/en-us/blog/2014/september/ddr3_vs_ddr... (2channel -> 4channel x2)