Advanced Micro Devices, Inc.
NETWORK-RELATED PERFORMANCE FOR GPUS

Abstract:

Techniques for improved networking performance in systems where a graphics processing unit or other highly parallel non-central-processing-unit (referred to as an accelerated processing device or "APD" herein) has the ability to directly issue commands to a networking device such as a network interface controller ("NIC") are disclosed. According to a first technique, the latency associated with loading certain metadata into NIC hardware memory is reduced or eliminated by pre-fetching network command queue metadata into hardware network command queue metadata slots of the NIC, thereby reducing the latency associated with fetching that metadata at a later time. A second technique involves reducing latency by prioritizing work on an APD when it is known that certain network traffic is soon to arrive over the network via a NIC.