NVLink, Pascal and Stacked Memory: Feeding the Appetite for Big Data

Originally published at: https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/nvlink-pascal-stacked-memory-feeding-appetite-big-data/

For more recent info on NVLink, check out the post, “How NVLink Will Enable Faster, Easier Multi-GPU Computing”. NVIDIA GPU accelerators have emerged in High-Performance Computing as an energy-efficient way to provide significant compute capability. The Green500 supercomputer list makes this clear: the top 10 supercomputers on the list feature NVIDIA GPUs. Today at the 2014…

This is pretty cool stuff. Looking at the future is always interesting. What fun problems to solve.

Kepler survives on quite well. Have to unfortunately replace my GTX 680, going from Kepler to Kepler! Maybe an upgrade to GK110 though.

Have any CPU vendors already committed to support NVLink? I could imagine that there was little incentive for AMD/Intel to foster their competition.

IBM has announced planned support for NVLink in future Power CPUs.
http://nvidianews.nvidia.co...

Makes sense. Close integration of GPU and Power cores is more promising than pairing the GPU with an ARM CPU. Looks like there is no shortage of exciting new supercomputer architectures. :-)

Can any estimates on latency and max. bus lengths be shared? I'm curious if NVLink could be used only as an in-rack network, or even beyond.

In a multi-GPU setup, will the available bandwidth between GPUs (and the CPU) be configurable? If so, will it be a hardware or software setting?

Unfortunately it's too early to provide detail at this level. Stay tuned.

It's too early to provide detail at this level. Stay tuned.

how can I get Specs for NVLINK?

We have not provided any more details in terms of specs for NVLINK. Stay tuned!

I have a Xeon 1230V2 (Ivy Bridge), just got it a few months ago so I will not be upgrading for awhile, will these GPU's be backward compatible or will I have to get a whole new Motherboard/Processor to use these things? Maybe an adapter will be made available for us? My tech knowledge is not novice but limited so I hope someone can at least give me a good guess. I know I may not be able to benefit from the 80+GB bandwidth but I could benefit from all the other enhancements.

Even though this is extreamly bad ass stuff. We the consumers dont really need this yet... We havent even touched the bandwith pcie 3.0 has...

This is true with GDDR5 but with HBM 2.0 we will indeed, and that is why this is coming out too as Nvidia had to do something as PCIE 3.0 was holding back performance. This will allow 60+FPS 4K on 1 card.

Will the NVLink specifications be available for external high-speed I/O devices (FPGAs) to send data directly to GPUs for processing?