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 EMC Isilon, IBM Spectrum Scale, NetApp ONTAP and BeeGFS, WekaFS™, VAST NFS, Dell Isilon, and Micron. 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 Benchmarking and Configuration Guide 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 new features have been added in v1.8.1:
- Added support for RHEL 9.2 on Grace Hopper platform with 64K host OS page size for EXT4 filesystems with Local NVMe.
- Improved the IO throughput performance for applications by adding topology awareness in compatibility mode.
Features introduced in previous releases: v1.8
- Assorted bug fixes.
v1.7.2
v1.7
v1.6.1
v1.5.1
v1.5:
- Added support for
cuMem*
memory allocations with cuFile APIs.
v1.4:
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
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 usenvidia_peermem
, load it using:# 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
andio_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.
Ubuntu 22.04.3 is not supported with any publicly available MLNX_OFED versions at this time.
MLNX_OFED version | Distros supported | Notes |
---|---|---|
5.4-x (LTS) | Ubuntu 18.04, 20.04,22.04, RHEL 8.x (>8.4), RHEL 9 | Long-term support version |
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 | |
5.9-x | UB22.04 and RHEL 9.1, 8.7 | NVMeOF is not functional. |
23.04-x | UB22.04 and RHEL 9.2, 8.8 | NVMeOF is not functional. |
23.07-x | UB22.04 and RHEL 9.2, 8.8 | NVMeOF is not functional |
23.10 | UB22.04 and RHEL 9.2 |
Supported GPUs: 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.
Partner/Distributed File SystemsPartner Comany | Partner Product Version | Compatible GDS Version | Date |
---|---|---|---|
HPE Ezmeral | 5.5 | 1.3.1 and higher | Feb 2023 |
HPE Cray ClusterStor | Neo 4.2 and newer | 1.0 and higher | Sep 2021 |
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 |
Distributed file systems are not supported on Grace CPU (NVIDIA's Arm-based CPU) based platforms.
GDS has been enabled in the following libraries and frameworks:
- RAPIDS cuDF: More details
- CLARA cuCIM: More details
- DALI: Python frameworks such as PyTorch are enabled to use DALI, which is intern enabled with GDS: More details
- MONAI: Python Framework for Medical Imaging and Deep learning: More details
- Clara Parabricks: More details
The GDS package contains the following Debian packages:
-
gds-tools-12-3_*.deb
-
libcufile-12-3*.deb
-
libcufile-dev-12-3_*.deb
-
nvidia-fs_2.18.3.deb
-
nvidia-fs-dkms_2.18.*.deb
-
nvidia-gds-12-3_*.deb
-
nvidia-gds_12-3.*.deb
Each component has a README file. For example, for gds-tools
, the README file is in the /usr/local/CUDA-12-3/gds/tools/
directory.
- GDS is not yet supported on Grace CPU based platforms with network file systems.
- Nvidia-fs can deadlock in
nv_p2p_dma_map_page
s andnv_p2p_mem_info_free_callback
functions when the user frees the CUDA memory without callingcuFileBufDeregister
on registered buffers. - For Grace CPU based platform (sbsa), GDS p2p mode IO can fail for registered buffers greater than or equal to 4GB in size.
-
On DDN EXAScaler filesystem:
- With stripe count > 1,
cuFileRead
andcuFileWrite
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
.
- With stripe count > 1,
- On DGX OS:
- For log collection, use
gds_log_collection.py
described in Sending Relevant Data to Customer Support.
- For log collection, use
cuFileRead
andcuFileWrite
APIs fail when working oncuMemMap
allocations with multiple GPUS, when the IO request to a GPU buffer is not 4K aligned and spans across multiple GPUs.- On Grace+Hopper systems:
- 4K kernel PAGE SIZE is not supported.
This section provides information about the known limitations in this release of GDS.
- All OS (BaseOS/RHEL/SLES ) for Grace-Hopper need persistence enabled.
- CUDA streams based APIs:
- CUDA graphs are not supported with cuFile Stream APIs.
- cuFile Stream APIs for GPFS and WekaFs are supported in compat mode only.
- cuFile Stream APIs are not supported when cuFile configuration parameter
execution.parallel_io
is false orexecution.max_io_threads
is set to 0. CU_FILE_STREAMS_SUPPORTED
bit is not set inProps.fflags
when queried withcuFileDriverGetProperties
.
- Available BAR1 memory reported by the
nvidia-smi
utility is not accurate due to some internal overhead of the CUDA toolkit. Therefore, a huge allocation of BAR1 memory by any GDS application can run into ENOMEM errors, even when nvidia-smi utility shows there is available BAR1 memory. - 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 Size
is set to zero bytes. - CentOS 7.x is no longer supported.
- Checksums on the client-side of file systems must be disabled for GDS.
- cuFile APIs are not supported with applications using the
fork()
system call. - GDS Compatibility mode is only tested on GDS qualified file systems: ext4, EXAScaler, XFS, WekaFS, IBM Spectrum Scale, VAST, and BeeGFS.
- On x86-64 platforms, GDS with “IOMMU=on” or ACS enabled are not guaranteed to work functionally or in a performant way.
- 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
- Upgrading of Linux Kernel version and
nv_peer_mem
:WekaFS (TM) does not support newer MOFED 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 section 2.2 of GDS Troubleshooting and installation guide.
- RHEL 8.3 or later 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 GDS Installation and Troubleshooting Guide.
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