NVIDIA Launches World's First High-Speed GPU Interconnect, Helping Pave the Way to Exascale Computing - Seite 2

This high-bandwidth interconnect will dramatically improve accelerated software application performance. Because of memory system differences -- GPUs have fast but small memories, and CPUs have large but slow memories -- accelerated computing applications typically move data from the network or disk storage to CPU memory, and then copy the data to GPU memory before it can be crunched by the GPU. With NVLink, the data moves between the CPU memory and GPU memory at much faster speeds, making GPU-accelerated applications run much faster.

Unified Memory Feature
Faster data movement, coupled with another feature known as Unified Memory, will simplify GPU accelerator programming. Unified Memory allows the programmer to treat the CPU and GPU memories as one block of memory. The programmer can operate on the data without worrying about whether it resides in the CPU's or GPU's memory.

Although future NVIDIA GPUs will continue to support PCIe, NVLink technology will be used for connecting GPUs to NVLink-enabled CPUs as well as providing high-bandwidth connections directly between multiple GPUs. Also, despite its very high bandwidth, NVLink is substantially more energy efficient per bit transferred than PCIe.

NVIDIA has designed a module to house GPUs based on the Pascal architecture with NVLink. This new GPU module is one-third the size of the standard PCIe boards used for GPUs today. Connectors at the bottom of the Pascal module enable it to be plugged into the motherboard, improving system design and signal integrity.

NVLink high-speed interconnect will enable the tightly coupled systems that present a path to highly energy-efficient and scalable exascale supercomputers, running at 1,000 petaflops (1 x 10¹⁸ floating point operations per second), or 50 to 100 times faster than today's fastest systems.

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About NVIDIA
Since 1993, NVIDIA (NASDAQ: NVDA) has pioneered the art and science of visual computing. The company's technologies are transforming a world of displays into a world of interactive discovery -- for everyone from gamers to scientists, and consumers to enterprise customers. More information at http://nvidianews.nvidia.com and http://blogs.nvidia.com.