On Tue, May 10, 2011 at 11:29 AM, Anatoly <legko...@fastmail.fm> wrote: > Good day, > > I think ZFS can take advantage of using GPU for sha256 calculation, > encryption and maybe compression. Modern video card, like 5xxx or 6xxx ATI > HD Series can do calculation of sha256 50-100 times faster than modern 4 > cores CPU. Ignoring optimizations from SIMD extensions like SSE and friends, this is probably true. However, the GPU also has to deal with the overhead of data transfer to itself before it can even begin crunching data. Granted, a Gen. 2 x16 link is quite speedy, but is CPU performance really that poor where a GPU can still out-perform it? My undergrad thesis dealt with computational acceleration utilizing CUDA, and the datasets had to scale quite a ways before there was a noticeable advantage in using a Tesla or similar over a bog-standard i7-920.
> The only problem that there is no AMD/Nvidia drivers for Solaris that > support hardware-assisted OpenCL. This, and keep in mind that most of the professional users here will likely be using professional hardware, where a simple 8MB Rage XL gets the job done thanks to the magic of out-of-band management cards and other such facilities. Even as a home user, I have not placed a high-end videocard into my machine, I use a $5 ATI PCI videocard that saw about a hour of use whilst I installed Solaris 11. -- --khd _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
