Researcher Shows How GPUs Make Terrific Network Monitors

alphadogg writes "A network researcher at the U.S. Department of Energy's Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory has found a potential new use for graphics processing units — capturing data about network traffic in real time. GPU-based network monitors could be uniquely qualified to keep pace with all the traffic flowing through networks running at 10Gbps or more, said Fermilab's Wenji Wu. Wenji presented his work as part of a poster series of new research at the SC 2013 supercomputing conference this week in Denver."

Comments

Re:That's it?

[timeOday]

They said it achieves a speedup of 17x, here is the graph:

CPU: X
GPU: XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

Re:That's it?

[TeXMaster]

Yeah but with this kind of applications the real bottleneck is the fact that the discrete GPU needs to access data through the high-latency, low-bandwidth PCIe bus. For this kind of application, an IGP, even with the lower core counts, is often a much better solution, unless you manage to fully cover the host-device-host transfers with computations.

I'd be really curious to see this thing done in OpenCL on a recent AMD APU, exploting all the CPU cores and the IGP cores concurrently.