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VUDA: A Vulkan Implementation of CUDA

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Re: VUDA: A Vulkan Implementation of CUDA

#31

Post by derstander »

iforgotpassword wrote: post #26
jitl wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Holtz is talking about drivers too, not just user space libraries. > The software is terrible! There’s kernel panics in the driver. You have to run a newer kernel than the Ubuntu default to make it remotely stable. I’m still not sure if the driver supports putting two cards in one machine, or if there’s some poorly written global state. When I put the second card in and run an OpenCL program, half the time it kernel…

This is still so mind-boggling to me. AMD should be in a good financial position now that Zen was such a success, and that their GPUs are catching up too. Why are their drivers still a Clusterfuck across the board after all these years? Why not throw more manpower at the problem? I'm sure even if their GPUs were twice as fast as Nvidia's, everybody would still buy team green because it's better to have a card that wo…

> And that use case is gaming on Windows, which supposedly is the best supported case.

I’m being a little tongue-in-cheek here, but the best supported case for AMD is gaming via console: AMD provides CPU/GPU for the current generation of both the XBox and PlayStation consoles.

Which suggests to me that they shouldn’t have too much problem supporting their hardware on Windows or Linux. But that’s outside of my area of expertise. Maybe they need to spend too much engineer effort and time supporting the consoles at what’s probably a pretty thin profit margin?

Re: VUDA: A Vulkan Implementation of CUDA

#32

Post by hedora »

themoonisachees wrote: post #25
flykespice wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And on what legal ground would NVIDIA have to take this down?

When you have Nvidia money you don't need grounds to sue, the lawyers will think of something and drag any open-source devs through years-long suits. The only saving grace would be Oracle v Google which established the de jure that an API isn't copyrightable.

APIs weren't copyrightable before Oracle v Google. There was plenty of precedent saying that. For example, before they were called Oracle, they built a clone of IBM SEQUEL.

The main concern with Oracle v Google was that the court would ignore or misinterpret the existing precedent.

A secondary concern was that a Google employee formerly worked on Java at Sun (and/or Oracle), and copy-pasted some implementation source code from oracle to google's code bases. There was a real possibility the "APIs aren't copyrightable" precedent would stand, but the courts would rule that Google couldn't continue distributing Dalvik.

Re: VUDA: A Vulkan Implementation of CUDA

#33

Post by empyrrhicist »

heyoni wrote: post #29
empyrrhicist wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know AMD has a whole bunch of (related?) projects for GPU compute, but man - if they could just provide an interop layer that Just Works they'd get immediate access to so much more market share.

Then they too could call themselves an AI company!

I've been hoping for it for so long - I wonder if there's enough interest that someone could do a GoFundMe to hire at least one full time dev lol.

Re: VUDA: A Vulkan Implementation of CUDA

#34

Post by sanxiyn »

empyrrhicist wrote: post #22
sheepscreek wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was half hoping this meant running CUDA code on AMD GPUs. Thanks for clarifying.

I know AMD has a whole bunch of (related?) projects for GPU compute, but man - if they could just provide an interop layer that Just Works they'd get immediate access to so much more market share.

Eh well, it is very close to just working. From "Training LLMs with AMD MI250 GPUs and MosaicML":

> It all just works. No code changes were needed.

https://www.mosaicml.com/blog/amd-mi250

Re: VUDA: A Vulkan Implementation of CUDA

#35

Post by collsni »

empyrrhicist wrote: post #22
sheepscreek wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was half hoping this meant running CUDA code on AMD GPUs. Thanks for clarifying.

I know AMD has a whole bunch of (related?) projects for GPU compute, but man - if they could just provide an interop layer that Just Works they'd get immediate access to so much more market share.

It is coming from what I can tell

Re: VUDA: A Vulkan Implementation of CUDA

#36

Post by einpoklum »

1. This implements the clunky C-ish API; there's also the Modern-C++ API wrappers, with automatic error checking, RAII resource control etc.; see: https://github.com/eyalroz/cuda-api-wrappers (due disclosure: I'm the author)

2. Implementing the _runtime_ API is not the right choice; it's important to implement the _driver_ API, otherwise you can't isolate contexts, dynamically add newly-compiled JIT kernels via modules etc.

3. This is less than 3000 lines of code. Wrapping all of the core CUDA APIs (driver, runtime, NVTX, JIT compilation of CUDA-C++ and of PTX) took me > 14,000 LoC.

Re: VUDA: A Vulkan Implementation of CUDA

#37

Post by metal_am »

roenxi wrote: post #12
Ballas wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My opinion is that CUDA is not the mote keeping the others out - it's the CUDNN (and CUBLAS), more specifically the level to which they are optimized.

I'm not even certain optimisation matters. I can crash my machine (AMD graphics) with a stock Debian install by letting something attempt BLAS on the GPU. The situation is starting to improve though. Installed a bunch of libraries from https://repo.radeon.com/rocm/apt/5.4 jammy main and the crashes got less frequent. I don't have a lot of faith in AMD to deliver reliable BLAS libraries at this point, but it could hap…

How about something like MAGMA?

Re: VUDA: A Vulkan Implementation of CUDA

#39

Post by roadbuster »

iforgotpassword wrote: post #26
jitl wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Holtz is talking about drivers too, not just user space libraries. > The software is terrible! There’s kernel panics in the driver. You have to run a newer kernel than the Ubuntu default to make it remotely stable. I’m still not sure if the driver supports putting two cards in one machine, or if there’s some poorly written global state. When I put the second card in and run an OpenCL program, half the time it kernel…

This is still so mind-boggling to me. AMD should be in a good financial position now that Zen was such a success, and that their GPUs are catching up too. Why are their drivers still a Clusterfuck across the board after all these years? Why not throw more manpower at the problem? I'm sure even if their GPUs were twice as fast as Nvidia's, everybody would still buy team green because it's better to have a card that wo…

> Why not throw more manpower at the problem?

Oh, of course.

Re: VUDA: A Vulkan Implementation of CUDA

#40

Post by iforgotpassword »

roadbuster wrote: post #39
iforgotpassword wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is still so mind-boggling to me. AMD should be in a good financial position now that Zen was such a success, and that their GPUs are catching up too. Why are their drivers still a Clusterfuck across the board after all these years? Why not throw more manpower at the problem? I'm sure even if their GPUs were twice as fast as Nvidia's, everybody would still buy team green because it's better to have a card that wo…

> Why not throw more manpower at the problem? Oh, of course.

No, really. We've worked with Intel, Nvidia and AMD... Well for the latter, at least tried. We're not a big fish, but response time and quality of responses were stellar with Intel and Nvidia. AMD took weeks and even when asking very precise questions with lots of technical background, there was a lot of "hmm dunno have to find someone who'd know" kind of answers, and it would often take one to two weeks for a single reply. And that's not even dev work, it's just tech support for your own damn stuff you're trying to sell.

You can't seriously tell me that's not something they could fix.

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