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The SBC can leverage Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) for increased transcoding capacity of T-SBC instances deployed in OpenStack cloud environments (Newton and above). GPU acceleration significantly increases transcoding capacity of virtual instances, which otherwise would have a limited scale. In many cases a GPU-accelerated solution performs better than specialized DSP hardware-based solutions. GPU-based solutions have the following benefits:

• GPUs are ubiquitous, they are being offered as Commercial Off-the-Shelf (COTS) solutions by major hardware and cloud vendors.
• GPU-based solutions leverage the steep rise in computing power delivered by increased industry investments in GPU technology.
• GPUs have diverse applications. Unlike specialized DSP hardware, GPU devices can be reused for other applications.
• GPUs can be leveraged by cloud-based virtual instances.

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GPU Transcoding

Prior to SBC 8.0 release, for GPU-based solutions, the 

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could not offer more than one transcodable codec in the outgoing offer for following reasons:

• Unlike CPU-based DSP that supports all the codecs, the GPU-based DSP supports specific codecs.
• For GPU, if the configured codecs do not reside on the same DSP process, they cannot be used with a single DSP allocation.
• Unaware of the cluster capabilities, the signaling SBC removes the codecs from the outgoing offer, which cannot be supported by the reserved DSP.

The

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 is enhanced to offer all the configured transcodable codecs that the 

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supports, in the outgoing offer and address the above GPU gaps.

The configured codecs include:

• Codecs configured for transcoding
• Codecs supported by same T-SBC instance that supports codecs received in the offer.

Supported Deployment Scenarios

GPU acceleration is currently supported on SBC SWe T-SBC instances on OpenStack (Newton and above). T-SBC is a component in Distributed SBC architecture that provides transcoding service.

GPU devices are attached to the SBC SWe instances through PCIe pass-through – a single GPU device can be used by only one instance at a time. The process of enabling PCIe pass-through in OpenStack is detailed later in this document. For performance considerations, NUMA locality of devices should be ensured.

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NVIDIA GRID is not supported.

Supported GPU Devices

The following NVIDIA GPU devices are supported.

Supported Codecs

• AMR-NB
• G729
• G722
• AMR-WB
• OPUS
• EVRC
• EVRCB

Feature Comparison of CPU and GPU T-SBC Solutions

While GPU-based T-SBCs offer marked increase in scale when compared to CPU-based T-SBCs, there are some caveats with the GPU solution that are highlighted in the following table. 

Table 1: Feature comparison of CPU and GPU T-SBC solution