Quo vadis AI: A survey of Machine Learning accelerators for Linux
Channel: SUSE Labs
Date: 29/10/2021

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Artificial Intelligence (AI) is trending in the industry, for data analysis without much coding. NVIDIA may seem the dominant hardware brand in Machine Learning, but the number of silicon vendors has grown to over two dozen, not counting pure Intellectual Property (IP) vendors. This survey categorizes available and announced chipsets and collects commonalities and architectural differences and their current state of kernel support. It goes on to investigate whether a new kernel subsystem could abstract common operations with a set of mandatory and optional callback hooks and a shared subset of device ioctls for common libraries and tools in userspace, to reduce vendor silos ("Choose Open") and to make it easier for chip vendors to contribute their drivers into the mainline kernel. Finally it gives a brief outlook on how such a kernel-centric approach might aid in improving performance and CPU utilization for analyzing live data streams such as camera feeds.

Speaker: Andreas Färber