Despite the popularity of GPUs in high-performance and scientific computing, and despite increasingly generalpurpose hardware capabilities, the use of GPUs in network servers or distributed systems poses significant challenges.

GPUnet is a native GPU networking layer that provides a socket abstraction and high-level networking APIs for GPU programs. We use GPUnet to streamline the development of high-performance, distributed applications like in-GPU-memory MapReduce and a new class of low-latency, high-throughput GPU-native network services such as a face verification server.