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Transfer cost

The time spent moving data between machines, or between host and GPU memory. Often the reason an operation is not worth accelerating.

The reason a GPU can measure slower than a CPU on small work: the data has to get there and back. Worth checking whenever an operation that should be faster is not.

GPU & accelerationPerformance & optimization

Related terms

  • GPU offloading: Moving computationally intensive operations onto a GPU. Eugo applies this automatically when a GPU is available and the data transfer is worth its cost.
  • Serialization: Converting Python objects into bytes so they can be sent to another machine. Large task arguments are serialized and copied to every worker that needs them.