On Thu, Dec 26, 2024 at 10:24:23PM -0800, Ron Minnich wrote:
[very interesting stuff]
>
> Finally, why did something like this not ever happen? Because GPUs
> came along a few years later and that's where all the parallelism in
> HPC is nowadays. NIX was a nice idea, but it did not survive in the
> GPU era.
>
GPUs are actually wreaking havoc other kernels, with, in the Unix
world, X11 being in a bad shape for several reasons, one being that
GPU are not limited to graphical display---this tends to be
anecdoctical in some sense.
Can you elaborate on the GPUs paradigm break? I tend to think that
there is a main difference between "equals" sharing a same address
space via MMU, and auxiliary processors that are using another address
space. A GPU, as far as I know (this is not much), is an auxiliary
processor when the GPU is discrete, and is a specialized processor
sharing the same address space when integrated (but I guess that a
HPC have discrete GPUs with perhaps a specialized connection).
Do you know good references about:
- organizing processors depending on memory connection---I found
mainly M. J. Flynn's paper(s) about this, but nothing more
recent---and the impact on an OS design;
- IPC vs threads---from your description, it seems that your solution
was multiplying processes so IPC instead of multiplying threads---but
nonetheless the sharing of differing memories remains, and is more
easy to solve with IPC than with threads;
- Present GPU's architecture (supposing it is documented; it seems not
totally from "General-Purpose Graphics Processor Archictectures",
Aamodt, Lun Fung, Rogers, SpringerVerlag) and the RISC-V approach,
composing hardware by connecting dedicated elements, and vectors vs
SIMT.
Thanks for sharing (what can be shared)!
--
Thierry Laronde <tlaronde +AT+ kergis +dot+ com>
http://www.kergis.com/
http://kertex.kergis.com/
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