Storage System Speed Serving Data To NVIDIA GPUs
Blocks&Files, Monday, July 31,2023
With Dell's PowerScale scale-out filer being included in the company's generative AI announcement this week, we looked at how it and other storage systems compare when using Nvidia's GPUDirect protocol, to serve data to and from Nvidia's GPUs.
GPUDirect Storage (GDS) is an NVMe and CPU-bypass protocol to enable storage systems to send data to SuperPod and other Nvidia GPU servers as fast as possible. For reads, traditional storage has a server's CPU copying data from its storage resource, DAS, SAN or NAS, into a memory buffer, and then writing it out to the network interface device for onward transmission. The data bounces, as it were, from the storage to a memory buffer before going to its destination. Incoming data (writes) follow the same route in reverse. GDS cuts out this bounce buffer stage and sends it direct from storage to the destination GPU system's memory.