NVIDIA GPUDirect Storage Release Notes

NVIDIA GPUDirect Storage Release Notes

Release information for NVIDIA® Magnum IO GPUDirect® Storage.

Release information for NVIDIA® GPUDirect® Storage (GDS) for developers and users.

NVIDIA® Magnum IO GPUDirect® Storage (GDS) is one of the members of the GPUDirect family of technologies. GDS enables a direct data path for direct memory access (DMA) transfers between GPU memory and storage. This direct path increases IO bandwidth, decreases IO latency and reduces the utilization load on the host CPU.

GDS is generally available on third party storage solutions such as DDN EXAScaler®, Dell Isilon, IBM Spectrum Scale, NetApp ONTAP, BeeGFS, WekaFS™, VAST NFS, Dell Isilon, NVmesh Excelero, ScaleFlux, Micron, and Pavilion Data. See the Support Matrix for the complete list. GDS documents and online resources provide additional context for the optimal use of and understanding of GPUDirect Storage. Refer to the following guides for more information about GDS:

• GPUDirect Storage Design Guide
• GPUDirect Storage Overview Guide
• cuFile API Reference Guide
• GPUDirect Storage Best Practices Guide
• GPUDirect Storage Installation and Troubleshooting Guide
• GPUDirect Storage O_DIRECT Requirements Guide

To learn more about GDS, refer to the following posts:

• GPUDirect Storage: A Direct Path Between Storage and GPU Memory
• The Magnum IO blog series.

The following features have been added in v1.6:

• Improved batch API performance.
• Implemented threadpool in the cuFile library to enable parallelism and improve throughput of a large IO request using a single user thread.

Features introduced in previous releases: v1.5.1

• Assorted bug fixes.

v1.5:

• Added support for cuMem* memory allocations with cuFile APIs.

v1.4:

• Hopper PCIe support
• RHEL 9.0 and Ubuntu 22.04 support

v1.3.1:

• GDS can be now installed through CUDA .run files.
• Support for Ubuntu 22.04 and RHEL9.
• Improvements to NIC to GPU affinity for userspace RDMA file systems.

v1.3

• Initial support for Linux dmabuf.

v1.2.1

• GDS now supports vGPU in VMware context. See https://docs.nvidia.com/grid/latest/grid-vgpu-release-notes-generic-linux-kvm/index.html#gpudirect-technology-support and https://docs.nvidia.com/grid/latest/grid-vgpu-user-guide/index.html#cuda-open-cl-support-vgpu for more information.

v1.2

• Support for BeeGFS.
• Support for XFS.
• Batch APIs available for use (Alpha level support).

v1.1.1:

• Use nvidia_peermem default for userspace RDMA filesystems (GPFS, Weka). In order to use nvidia_peermem, load it using:
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  # modprobe nvidia_peermem
          

• Added support for BeeGFS (preview).

v1.1:

• The XFS file system has been added to the list of supported file systems at a a beta support level.
• Improved support for unregistered buffers.
• Added options start_offset and io_size to gdsio config file per job options.
• Improved performance of 4K and 8K IO sizes for local file systems.
• Added user-configurable priority for internal cuFile CUDA streams.

v1.0:

• New configuration and environment variables for the cuFile library.
• Fixed error handling behavior for Weka retriable and unsupported errors.
• Removed hard dependency on librcu-bp.
• Added read support for IBM Spectrum Scale.

v0.95:

• Compatibility with POSIX IO is enabled by default.

• Alpha level support for RHEL 8.3.

• GDS is available as Technical preview for DGX OS.

• Support for MLNX_OFED 5.3 for NVMe and NVMeOF.

• Support for Excelero™ NVMesh devices.

• Support for ScaleFlux computational storage.

• Integration with DALI and PyTorch.

• Experimental RAPIDS integration for cuDF, unoptimized, reads only.

The following are the MLNX_OFED and filesystem requirements for GDS:

• MLNX_OFED must be installed before installing GDS. Refer to Installing GPUDirect Storage for more information about installing MLNX_OFED.

• nvidia-fs.ko requires Linux kernels 4.15.x and above.

Table 1.

MLNX_OFED version	Distros supported	Notes
5.4-x (LTS)	Ubuntu 18.04, 20.04,22.04, RHEL 8.x (>8.4), RHEL 9
5.5-x	Ubuntu 18.04, 20.04, RHEL 8.4, RHEL 8.6
5.6-x	Ubuntu 18.04, 20.04, RHEL 8.4, RHEL 8.6
5.7-x	Ubuntu 18.04, 20.04, RHEL 8.4, RHEL 8.6	Does not support RHEL9 and UB22.04
5.8-x (LTS)	Ubuntu 18.04, 20.04,22.04, RHEL 8.x (>8.4), RHEL 9, Rocky Linux 9.x, RockyLinux 8.x

GDS has been tested on following NVIDIA GPUs:T10x, T4, A10, Quadro P6000, A100, and V100. For a full list of GPUs that GDS works with, refer to the Known Limitations section.

Partner/Distributed File Systems

Partner Comany	Partner Product Version	Compatible GDS Version	Date
HPE Ezmeral	5.5	1.3.1 and higher	Feb 2023
NetApp	ONTAP 9.10.1	1.0 and higher	Jan 2022
NetApp ThinkParQ System Fabrics Works	7.3.0	1.1.1 and higher	March 2022
IBM	Spectrum Scale 5.1.2 and newer	1.1 and higher	Nov 2021
DDN	EXAScaler 5.2 and newer EXAScaler 6.0 and newer	1.1 and higher	Nov 2021
VAST	Universal Storage 4.1	1.1 and higher	Nov 2021
WekaIO	WekaFS 3.13	1.0	June 2021
DellEMC	PowerScale 9.2.0.0	1.0	Oct 2021
Hitachi Vantara	HCSF	1.0	Oct 2021

Local File Systems GDS supports following local file systems:

• EXT4
• XFS

GDS has been enabled in the following libraries:

• RAPIDS cuDF: More details
• CLARA cuCIM: More details
• DALI: More details
• Spark: More details

The GDS package contains the following Debian packages:

• gds-tools-12-0_*.deb

• libcufile-12-0*.deb

• libcufile-dev-12-0_*.deb

• nvidia-fs_2.14.12.deb

• nvidia-fs-dkms_2.14.*.deb

• nvidia-gds-12-0_*.deb

• nvidia-gds_12-0.*.deb

The following minor updates and bug fixes were made in version 1.6:

• Reduced CPU utilization when using threadpool threads.

The following are known issues in this release of GDS.

• In GDS version 1.5, libcufile_static.a is built with g++11 and libstdc++6.0.19. Use of libcufile_static.a on older gcc compiler (<9.4) results into linking errors and hence libcufile_static.a cannot be used.
• In case of WRITE operations, occasionally DDN Exascaler 6.1 returns an error while flushing the data to the storage, resulting in a failure.
• With DDN Exascaler 6.1, RHEL 9 is not supported.
• For best performance of NFSoRDMA on bare metal, please use MLNX-OFED 5.4-x.

• On RHEL systems, there is no/etc/cufile.json symlink in the .run installer. In order to solve this issue, create a symlink to the default installed configuration file using following command:

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  sudo ln -s /usr/local/cuda-11.8/gds/cufile.json /etc/cufile.json
          

• Upgrading of Linux Kernel version and nv_peer_mem: WekaFS does not support newer MLNX_OFED versions 5.3.x and above with GDS. nvidia-peer-memory-dkms=1.1-0-nvidia2 is required for GDS support with WekaFS. Please follow the instructions in Installing GDS.

• For DDN EXAScaler filesystem:

  • With stripe count > 1, cuFileRead and cuFileWrite do not work with poll mode enabled for versions older than 2.12.5_ddn10.
  • With 2.12.5_ddn10, any reads beyond EOF causes a BUG_ON inside nvidia-fs.

• RHEL8.3 does not have default udev rules for detecting RAID members, which disables GDS on RAID volumes. Refer to the section Adding udev Rules for RAID Volumes in the GPUDirect Storage Installation and Troubleshooting Guide.

• On DGX OS:
  • For log collection, use gds_log_collection.py described in Sending Relevant Data to Customer Support.

This section provides information about the known limitations in this release of GDS.

• Batch APIs and poll mode will not work with device files:
  • XFS on RAID is not supported
• GPUDirect storage in P2P mode does not support NVMe end to end data protection features. To support GDS in p2p mode, the NVMe must be formatted with Protection Information where Metadata Sizeis set to zero bytes.
• CentOS 7.x is no longer supported.
• Data Center and Quadro (desktop) cards with compute capability > 6 listed here: https://developer.nvidia.com/cuda-gpus#compute are supported in GDS mode. All other cards are supported only in compatibility mode.
• With any NVIDIA software components installed, downgrading from RHEL 8.4 to RHEL 8.3 is not supported.
• For DDN EXAScaler, checksum is disabled in the read/write IO path.
• For WekaFS, checksum is disabled in the read/write IO path.
• cuFile APIs are not supported with applications using the fork() system call.
• GDS Compatibility mode works on GDS qualified file systems: EXAScaler, XFS, ext4, IBM Spectrum Scale, VAST, and WekaFS.
• GDS with IOMMU enabled or ACS enabled are not guaranteed to work functionally or in a performant way with all non-DGX based platforms.
• Refer to the following documentation for IBM Spectrum Scale Limitations with GDS: https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/spectrum-scale/5.1.5?topic=architecture-gpudirect-storage-support-spectrum-scale

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