On 04/08/18 09:59, Jakub Narebski wrote: >> This is an entirely idle pondering kind of question, but I wanted to >> ask. I recently discovered that some edge providers are starting to >> offer systems with GPU cards in them -- primarily for clients that need >> to provide streaming video content, I guess. As someone who needs to run >> a distributed network of edge nodes for a fairly popular git server, I >> wondered if git could at all benefit from utilizing a GPU card for >> something like delta calculations or compression offload, or if benefits >> would be negligible. > > The problem is that you need to transfer the data from the main memory > (host memory) geared towards low-latency thanks to cache hierarchy, to > the GPU memory (device memory) geared towards bandwidth and parallel > access, and back again. So to make sense the time for copying data plus > the time to perform calculations on GPU (and not all kinds of > computations can be speed up on GPU -- you need fine-grained massively > data-parallel task) must be less than time to perform calculations on > CPU (with multi-threading). Would something like this be well-suited for tasks like routine fsck, repacking and bitmap generation? That's the kind of workloads I was imagining it would be most well-suited for. > Also you would need to keep non-GPU and GPGPU code in sync. Some parts > of code do not change much; and there also solutions to generate dual > code from one source. > > Still, it might be good idea, I'm still totally the wrong person to be implementing this, but I do have access to Packet.net's edge systems which carry powerful GPUs for projects that might be needing these for video streaming services. It seems a shame to have them sitting idle if I can offload some of the RAM- and CPU-hungry tasks like repacking to be running there. Best, -- Konstantin Ryabitsev Director, IT Infrastructure Security The Linux Foundation
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