Using GPUs in KVM Virtual Machines

Pavan YalamanchiliHardware & Infrastructure, Open Source 2 Comments

Introduction A couple of months ago, I began investigating GPU passthrough on my workstation to test ArrayFire on different operating systems. Around the same time, we at ArrayFire found ourselves with a few surplus GPUs. Having had great success with my virtualization efforts, we decided to build a Virtualized GPU Server to utilize these GPUs. Building a Virtualized GPU Server alleviated one of the pain points at our company: We no longer need to swap GPUs or Hard Disks to test a new environment. To maximize the number of GPUs we can put in a machine, we ended up getting a Quantum TXR430-0768R from Exxact Computing which comes in a 4U form factor and supports upto 8x double width GPUs. …

Getting Started with the Intel Xeon Phi on Ubuntu 14.04/Linux Kernel 3.13.0

Peter EntschevHardware & Infrastructure, OpenCL 25 Comments

You may already know that the Intel MPSS (Manycore Platform Software Stack) officially only supports the RedHat and SUSE Linux distros. Using an enterprise distro might be very interesting if your company is running a large server environment or short on specialized people and you rely on the distro official support for more complicated tasks. Not all companies use enterprise Linux distributions. Ubuntu has a large share of the Linux distro market (if not the largest). A while back, I needed to setup a machine running Ubuntu 14.04 and MPSS 3.4.x and could not find any documentation running the newest versions of Ubuntu/Linux Kernel/MPSS. In this blog, I will try to document how to get the Intel Xeon Phi running …

How to Make GPU Hardware Decisions

ScottComputing Trends, CUDA, Hardware & Infrastructure, OpenCL Leave a Comment

We get questions all the time about how to make GPU hardware decisions. We’ve seen just about every scenario you can imagine, and so we always jump at the chance to help others through this decision process. Here’s a recent question from a customer. “I’ve just found your post on Analytic Bridge and have taken a look at your website … I’m replacing my two Tesla M1060 cards (computing capability too low) and I’m considering used Tesla M2070s or the new GTX 760 cards. Could you offer any insight? I believe the GTX 760 cards may well outperform the older 2070s and are much cheaper.” And here’s our response. “The GTX 760 will probably outperform the M2070 for single precision …

GitLab at ArrayFire

Shehzan MohammedHardware & Infrastructure Leave a Comment

Until recently, we had our central git repositories hosted on a virtual machine. This was running on a big, noisy, rack mounted server. We started thinking about cutting down the number of machines we use on a daily basis (Just can’t stop optimizing). The opportunity popped up during an office move to our new location. We had discussed this idea in a few meetings before, but for various reasons, they were not acted upon. During the move Umar started hacking on GitLab to get it working for us internally. The office move came as a blessing in disguise. He used one of our old Dell Inspiron laptops that was just gathering dust. We ordered new DDR2 (yes, DDR2) RAM for it and installed …