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Comment on Full-scale file system acceleration on GPU [pdf]

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I didn't fully read the paper, but few questions come into mind.

1) How does this work differ from Mark Silberstein's GPUfs from 2014 [1]?

2) Does this work assume the storage device is only accessed by the GPU? Otherwise, how do you guarantee consistency when multiple processes can map, read and write the same files? You mention POSIX. POSIX has MAP_SHARED. How is this situation handled?

3) Related to (2), on the device level, how do you sync CPU (on an SMP, multiple cores) and GPU accesses?

[1] https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2553081

1) How does this work differ from Mark Silberstein's GPUfs from 2014 [1]?

Just quoting the paper:

Using GPUfs, Silberstein et al . [ 24] demonstrate that offering a library interface to CPU FS eases access to storage for GPU programmers, but GPUfs only calls a CPU-side file system. GPU4FS offers a similar interface to GPUfs, but runs the file system on the GPU.

Thanks for the quote!

In this case, it is indeed novel to run the logic of the filesystem on the GPU itself. It's definitely worth the investigation!

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