4 ms·

What is NVLink, and what does it mean in terms of data transfer?

by marcell 10y ago

fulafel 10y ago
It'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 ago
  I'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 ago
    CAPI 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 ago
http://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.)"

4 ms·

What is NVLink, and what does it mean in terms of data transfer?

by marcell 10y ago

What is NVLink, and what does it mean in terms of data transfer?

fulafel 10y ago
It'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 ago
  I'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 ago
    CAPI 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 ago
http://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.)"