Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

VUDA: A Vulkan Implementation of CUDA

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 83 posts

Re: VUDA: A Vulkan Implementation of CUDA

#71

Post by netheril96 »

bornfreddy wrote: post #49
netheril96 wrote: post #30

Just in case other people who have AMD GPU and run Windows have the same needs as I have, that is, to train or run machine learning models, please checkout torch-directml and tensorflow-directml.

Does that work? I might be in market for a new GPU if AMD had something that beats NVidia for ML (for sane price)... I can't really justify buying NVidia GPU, anything decent is too expensive.

It works for me. I have no issues training a WGAN with it. But I don’t know how much slower it is compared to CUDA on a similar priced NVIDIA card.

Re: VUDA: A Vulkan Implementation of CUDA

#72

Post by netheril96 »

skocznymroczny wrote: post #54
netheril96 wrote: post #30

Just in case other people who have AMD GPU and run Windows have the same needs as I have, that is, to train or run machine learning models, please checkout torch-directml and tensorflow-directml.

How does it work? Last time I tried DirectML it wasn't well supposed and there was little software which supported it. Also the performance seemed to be not too great. I am currently using a Linux install because with ROCm I can use popular tools like Automatic111 webui and oobabooga.

I trained a WGAN on torch-directml with no issues so the software seems quite supported. But I can’t speak of performance because I have nothing to compare against.

Re: VUDA: A Vulkan Implementation of CUDA

#73

Post by causality0 »

sheepscreek wrote: post #19
fancyfredbot wrote: post #17

It's not an implementation of CUDA, it's an implementation of the CUDA runtime API. The API is used to configure the card, allocate and copy memory, and run kernels. Importantly you cannot use this to write the actual kernels which run on the GPU!

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

Vulkan doesn't exactly work great on AMD either. I'm in the process of returning a 7900XTX right now because of AMD's busted Vulkan drivers.

Re: VUDA: A Vulkan Implementation of CUDA

#74

Post by aidenn0 »

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.

I thought that Oracle v Google established that APIs are copyrightable, but Google's copying met the terms for fair use?

Re: VUDA: A Vulkan Implementation of CUDA

#75

Post by roenxi »

metal_am wrote: post #37
roenxi wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

No idea. But if it goes through OpenCl it will likely expose the same bugs.

Re: VUDA: A Vulkan Implementation of CUDA

#76

Post by userbinator »

Conscat wrote: post #69
xeonmc wrote: post #38

Huge missed opportunity to call it "Vuudoo"

Might be confusing with Voodoo https://github.com/cogciprocate/voodoo

That's already confusing enough with the 3dfx GPUs of the same name:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3dfx_Interactive#Product_devel...

Re: VUDA: A Vulkan Implementation of CUDA

#77

Post by Ballas »

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…

I do find it strange that AMD is not allocating more resources to ROCM, given that that seems to be where the money is, at least from my viewpoint. I guess they have been able to sell more cards than they could manufacture, but that seems to be changing.

Re: VUDA: A Vulkan Implementation of CUDA

#78

Post by scienceplease »

jdoerfert wrote: post #55
sheepscreek wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Shameless plug: https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/1892137 TLDR; If you provide even more functions through the overloaded headers, incl. "hidden ones", e.g., `__cudaPushCallConfiguration`, you can use LLVM/Clang as a CUDA compiler and target AMD GPUs, the host, and soon GPUs of two other manufacturers.

This is really amazing work! Is it still ongoing/funded?

Re: VUDA: A Vulkan Implementation of CUDA

#79

Post by stuaxo »

paulmd wrote: post #56
sanxiyn wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

“Just works” in this context means executing the compiled CUDA or the PTX bytecode without recompiling. Nobody is ever going to utilize ROCm if it requires distributing as source and recompiling. To make it even more insulting, even simply installing ROCm itself is a massive burden, even on an ostensibly-supported (as geohot discovered) and even just “it works out of the box if you distribute and compile it locally”…

Having to use a special kernel for ROCm is a real pain, I can't just use it like I can with Mesa.

I have enough issues using graphics already so I'll stick with Mesa.

Re: VUDA: A Vulkan Implementation of CUDA

#80

Post by juunpp »

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.

That's HIP / ROCm: https://rocm.docs.amd.com/projects/HIP/en/latest/index.html

But it currently only runs on CDNA boards and enterprise-y Linux distros (Ubuntu LTS, Centos, etc.)

Post reply on HN