KhronosGroup / KhronosGroup/OpenCL-Docs

OpenCL 3.0 extentions for remote DMA?

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enhancement
Dominant language
Python
Stars
421
Forks
132
Avg merge
5d 13h
Merged PRs (30d)
11

Description

On a lot of scenarios, GPUs and other accelerators are used in combination with each other, and in communicate with other non-accelerator devices such as NIC cards, proprietary FPGAs, frame grabbers etc.

Currently, Memory transfers between devices have to travel through host memory, unless special extensions are used.

Both NVidia and AMD offer extensions to support remote DMA with other devices sharing the same PCIe bus: GPUDirect RDMA (Cuda-linux only) and DirectGMA (AMD))

These extensions are almost trivial to implement on the driver level - merely exposing a physical bus address to which another device can potentially perform DMA.

Their usefulness of direct memory access between devices without having to go through host-memory is enormous, and in my opinion is a natural feature for an API such as OpenCL. Which strives to be available on a broad variety of device configurations.

Has the working group considered such extensions?
(It is my understanding the the new async-dma extentions are something completely different)

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First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

Review the OpenCL 3.0 async-DMA extensions and the issue's references to GPUDirect RDMA and AMD DirectGMA. Determine whether remote device-to-device DMA belongs in an OpenCL extension, and document a decided specification direction; the issue currently asks a design question rather than naming files or tests.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Domain
api, backend-api-design
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Needs clarification
Newbie friendliness
20/100

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