GPU-Ether: GPU-native Packet I/O for GPU Applications on Commodity Ethernet

Despite the advent of various network enhancement technologies, it is yet a challenge to provide high-performance networking for GPU-accelerated applications on commodity Ethernet. Kernel-bypass I/O, such as DPDK or netmap, which is normally optimized for host memory-based CPU applications, has limitations on improving the performance of GPU-accelerated applications due to the data transfer overhead between host and GPU. In this paper, we propose GPU-Ether, GPU-native packet I/O on commodity Ethernet, which enables direct network access from GPU via dedicated persistent kernel threads. We implement GPU-Ether prototype on a commodity Ethernet NIC and perform extensive testing to evaluate it. The results show that GPU-Ether can provide high throughput and low latency for GPU applications.