On Tue, Nov 30, 2021 at 12:58:10PM +0100, Paul Menzel wrote:

Dear Linux folks,


I read about GRAID SupremeRAID [1], which seems to be an Nvidia T1000 card
and software to use the card for RAID calculations.

quoted

GRAID SupremeRAID works by installing a virtual NVMe controller onto
the operating system and integrating a PCIe device into the system
equipped with a high-performance AI processor to handle all RAID
operations of the virtual NVMe controller

According to the review *GRAID SupremeRAID SR-1000 Review* [2] it performs
quite well. I couldn’t find any driver files online.

Now I am wondering, why a graphics card seems to help so much. What
operations are there, modern CPUs cannot keep up with?

If GPUs are that much better, are people already working on a FLOSS solution
for the Linux kernel, so people can “just” plug in a graphics card to
increase the speed?

Does the Linux kernel already have an API to offload calculations to
accelerator cards, so it’s basically plug and play (with AMD graphics cards
for example using HSA/KFD)? Entropy sources, like the ChaosKey [3], work
like that. If not, would the implementation go under `lib/raid6`?

I think this was somehow discussed here
some times ago.
That is the use of "GPU" to accellerate
the parity computation.

There are a couple of things to keep in mind.

One is the data transfer to / from the video
card, which might be a bottleneck.
At any rate, there will be a write and read
streams going across the system bus(es).

An other point is that, unless an high end
video card is used, with ECC memory, the
reliability of the whole process might be
of concern.

Finally, usually video cards, while having
a lot of memory (caching could be good),
they miss the battery backup.
Power is off, data is gone...

bye,

pg

Kind regards,

Paul


[1]: https://www.graidtech.com/post/graid-reveals-the-next-generation-of-enterprise-data-protection-nvme-ssds
[2]: https://www.storagereview.com/review/graid-supremeraid-sr-1000-review
[3]: https://altusmetrum.org/ChaosKey/

-- 

piergiorgio