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GPUs are great for things that are parallelizable, but a lot of things aren't. Technologies like GPUDirect are interesting in that vein. Theoretically you can
by juliangoldsmith 3y ago
GPUs are great for things that are parallelizable, but a lot of things aren't.
Technologies like GPUDirect are interesting in that vein. Theoretically you can DMA data directly from an NVMe drive on another machine, across an Infiniband link, and into VRAM without the data ever touching the CPU.
- londons_explore 3y agoMore importantly, why wasn't that possible in 1998? CPU independent DMA engines have existed since 1995 or earlier... DMA engines can typically be controlled by a queue of work, and can read/write to anything memory mapped. The work units themselves can be in memory mapped space of the GPU or network adapter, allowing those devices to queue up work too. And the DMA transfer can be triggered by any interrupt source too (initially intended for things like sound cards to have a tiny buffer be frequently refilled by the DMA engine without CPU intervention). Basically, hardware has supported this forever. It is software that is lagging.
- gumballindie 3y agoEvery now and then there’s a comment on HN that either ruins my weekend or my budget. Yours does both. I have to get both types of devices now to play around with.
- KeplerBoy 3y agoIt goes beyond that. You can DMA stuff directly from a NIC into VRAM. That's probably why Nvidia acquired Mellanox a few years ago.