Accelerating data transfer between host and device using idle GPU

Abstract

When running single-GPU applications on multi-GPU compute nodes, the remaining GPU devices are kept idle. We propose a novel technology to accelerate these single-GPU applications using the idle GPU devices. The data transfers between host and device are performed not only by the first GPU but also by the second GPU as well as the alternative route with PCI-Express and NV-Link connected to it. Our performance evaluations show the proposed method enables about twice data transfer speed as native single GPU case for large data sizes.