Beating C with Futhark Running on GPU
futhark-lang.org
Beating C with Futhark Running on GPU
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Re: Beating C with Futhark Running on GPU
#2Very honest discussion of the results. I liked it.
Would it be possible to use Futhark to rewrite the APL implementation instead of the Haskell one? That would make an interesting comparison.
Re: Beating C with Futhark Running on GPU
#3C is the Mike Tyson of programming languages. There will never be another like it. It's simple, dangerous and fast. You can't beat C, but everyone will keep trying. It may beat itself in the end though as it's too rough for the modern world.
Re: Beating C with Futhark Running on GPU
#4This sounds smart. I haven't programmed Futhark yet, though, but I really enjoy functional programming. Where is this language primarily used, at universities or also in industry?
Re: Beating C with Futhark Running on GPU
#5C is the Mike Tyson of programming languages. There will never be another like it. It's simple, dangerous and fast. You can't beat C, but everyone will keep trying. It may beat itself in the end though as it's too rough for the modern world.
"Oh, it was quite a while ago. I kind of stopped when C came out. That was a big blow. We were making so much good progress on optimizations and transformations. We were getting rid of just one nice problem after another. When C came out, at one of the SIGPLAN compiler conferences, there was a debate between Steve Johnson from Bell Labs, who was supporting C, and one of our people, Bill Harrison, who was working on a project that I had at that time supporting automatic optimization...The nubbin of the debate was Steve's defense of not having to build optimizers anymore because the programmer would take care of it. That it was really a programmer's issue.... Seibel: Do you think C is a reasonable language if they had restricted its use to operating-system kernels? Allen: Oh, yeah. That would have been fine. And, in fact, you need to have something like that, something where experts can really fine-tune without big bottlenecks because those are key problems to solve. By 1960, we had a long list of amazing languages: Lisp, APL, Fortran, COBOL, Algol 60. These are higher-level than C. We have seriously regressed, since C developed. C has destroyed our ability to advance the state of the art in automatic optimization, automatic parallelization, automatic mapping of a high-level language to the machine. This is one of the reasons compilers are ... basically not taught much anymore in the colleges and universities."
-- Fran Allen interview, Excerpted from: Peter Seibel. Coders at Work: Reflections on the Craft of Programming
Re: Beating C with Futhark Running on GPU
#6This sounds smart. I haven't programmed Futhark yet, though, but I really enjoy functional programming. Where is this language primarily used, at universities or also in industry?
I got to use it in university in a course about parallel functional programming. I think it is still mostly a research language, but if you need to do computation on the GPU and like func prog then it probably would be an interesting alternative to try out. It really does a great job of optimizing and parallizing you program.
Re: Beating C with Futhark Running on GPU
#7This sounds smart. I haven't programmed Futhark yet, though, but I really enjoy functional programming. Where is this language primarily used, at universities or also in industry?
I got to use it in university in a course about parallel functional programming. I think it is still mostly a research language, but if you need to do computation on the GPU and like func prog then it probably would be an interesting alternative to try out. It really does a great job of optimizing and parallizing you program.
Which university? :)
Re: Beating C with Futhark Running on GPU
#8Earlier quoted context omitted.
I got to use it in university in a course about parallel functional programming. I think it is still mostly a research language, but if you need to do computation on the GPU and like func prog then it probably would be an interesting alternative to try out. It really does a great job of optimizing and parallizing you program.
Which university? :)
Chalmers University of Technology, in Gothenburg. Though Futhark is developed in Copenhagen I think. We had a guest lecture with one of the developers of the language. Was a really interesting lecture together with some exercise for us to play with the Lang. Though it has gotten even better since then from what I've seen in their blog.
Re: Beating C with Futhark Running on GPU
#9I'm starting to sound like a broken record on this, but if you're going to compare to your system wc without trying to figure out if it was compiled with -O3 [EDIT: and what source code it was compiled from], you haven't shown anything in the sequential case.
What this article does show is that Futhark really does allow one to express this in a much simpler way than Haskell.
Re: Beating C with Futhark Running on GPU
#10C is the Mike Tyson of programming languages. There will never be another like it. It's simple, dangerous and fast. You can't beat C, but everyone will keep trying. It may beat itself in the end though as it's too rough for the modern world.
I mean, Futhark certainly can. The whole point of Futhark is that it's a functional language that can run on GPUs. Futhark will beat the pants off of C for most any problem that is suitable for GPU computation, even if written in an entirely functional style.
For CPUs, I'd like to introduce you to my good friend Fortran.