Direct GPU/FPGA Communication Via PCI Express
- Ray Bittner ,
- Erik Ruf ,
- Alessandro Forin
Cluster Computing |
This document is the authors’ preliminary version of an article to appear in Cluster Computing, a publication of Springer-Verlag, which holds copyright to the final work. The official publication is available at http://www.springerlink.com/openurl.asp?genre=article&id=doi:10.1007/s10586-013-0280-9.
We describe a mechanism for connecting GPU and FPGA devices directly via the PCI Express bus, enabling the transfer of data between these heterogeneous computing units without the intermediate use of system memory. We evaluate the performance benefits of this approach over a range of transfer sizes, and demonstrate its utility in a computer vision application. We find that bypassing system memory yields improvements as high as 2.2x in data transfer speed, and 1.9x in application performance.