5 ms·
Correct me if I'm wrong, but Microsoft's DirectStorage seems to me something like what the author is writing about. It lets you do eg massively parallel NVME fi
by pizza 2y ago
Correct me if I'm wrong, but Microsoft's DirectStorage seems to me something like what the author is writing about. It lets you do eg massively parallel NVME file io ops from the GPU itself of lots of small files. This avoids the delay of the path through the CPU, any extra threads/saturation of the CPU, and even lets you do eg decompression of game assets on the GPU itself thereby saving even more CPU. This demo benchmark shows DEFLATE going from 1 GB/s on CPU to 7 GBs/ on GPU https://github.com/microsoft/DirectStorage/tree/main/Samples/GpuDecompressionBenchmark https://github.com/microsoft/DirectStorage/tree/main/Samples...
- dudeinjapan 2y agoI interpreted it as mainly network I/O, but the core point in the article is less about the I/O itself and more about thread-based async I/O handling.
- pizza 2y agoI see, I had this notion that DirectStorage worked by somehow allowing the GPU cores to host multiple parallel threads each doing full requests on their own, but on further research I was mistaken - requests are still CPU-submitted
- compressedgas 2y agoI recently sought to check if DirectStorage used PCIe P2P to transfer data from the SSD to the GPU memory. It definitely could use it but I didn't see any evidence that it did.