Erik Trimble wrote:
On 7/18/2010 5:01 AM, "C. Bergström" wrote:
Rob Clark wrote:
If SunStudio had some GPU support and there were a few functions
added for the hotpoints ...
GPUs are great for some things but it is difficult to imagine a GPU
being of assistance in the zfs implementation due to way too much
latency, optimization for floating point rather than integer, and
due to creating a "hotpoint". For zfs it is much better to spread
the load across multiple CPU cores using many threads as is done now.
Bob
--
If you wait long enough someone will 'build a Bridge to it' ...
Accelerating Distributed Storage Systems with CUDA - Paper & Code
http://www.nvidia.com/object/cuda_apps_flash_new.html#state=detailsOpen;aid=e223fbfc-f017-498c-8174-699747dbd88b
I believe I commented on this thread before and that paper mostly
focuses on hashed and md5 checksums. The other problem is that while
as long as the GPU is on the other side of the memory controller it's
unlikely to be "cost" (performance/latency) effective to do the
expensive round-trip for small chunks of data. Depending on the
storage topology and stack of course... *If* you had some master node
doing checksums or doing it at the application layer it could
possible make sense, but it would need to be some seriously huge
workload to justify it
GPUs sitting on the PCI-E bus are going to have this problem, and it's
likely insurmountable.
HOWEVER, AMD *is* finally getting around to implementing a GPU in the
same package as the CPU, so we'll shortly be able to see a combined
CPU/GPU thing that sits in an AM3 socket (or, more likely, a C32
socket). There's even a possibility that AMD's talked about where an
advanced GPU will live in a second CPU-style socket, with direct HT
connections. This sort of design at least leads itself to being
used as a co-processor, as it has direct low-latency connection to the
memory contoller/bus.
lalala.. hear no evil.. speak no evil... Does it *really* sound so fun
to write code generation for x86_64 *AND* ATI VLIW targets... Unless
everyone wants to rewrite their code in highly explicit parallel
programming models I think there's a huge amount of work before general
applications can really benefit from this.. I'd be happy to see a fully
automatic solution for optimally offloading general application code to
the GPU by 2012..
(I also don't know if Fusion, which is what I think you're referring to,
is really going to initially target the high performance/visualization
market.. If this is the case it's much less likely to solve performance
problems and be better suited for improving efficiency..)
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