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Bend: a high-level language that runs on GPUs (via HVM2)

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Re: Bend: a high-level language that runs on GPUs (via HVM2)

#121

Post by Ar-Curunir »

nneonneo wrote: post #93
naasking wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's how development under open source works. You can't please everyone.

There’s a big difference between developing something and announcing loudly that you have something cool; the developers have done the latter here.

Thats completely unfair. They have developed something cool, just with not all the holes plugged.

Re: Bend: a high-level language that runs on GPUs (via HVM2)

#122

Post by vrmiguel »

nneonneo wrote: post #93
naasking wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's how development under open source works. You can't please everyone.

There’s a big difference between developing something and announcing loudly that you have something cool; the developers have done the latter here.

I think it's clearly pretty cool even if not as fast as people expect it to be

Re: Bend: a high-level language that runs on GPUs (via HVM2)

#123

Post by api »

zackmorris wrote: post #100
api wrote: post #10

Oh wow do I wish this existed when I was playing with evolutionary computation and genetic algorithms in college…

Me too, now you see why they never took off.

They never took off because we discovered, to our surprise to some extent, that gradient descent through back propagation works better than expected if you give it the right learning media and the right input and output encodings. It took a ton of fiddling ("graduate student descent") to figure those out.

Back then everyone thought it was doomed to get stuck at local minima, but it turns out that has a lower probability of happening if the search space has enough dimensions. It works well enough to make the sand talk back to us and now that particular design has sucked all the air out of the room.

Nobody has tried EC at anywhere near the scale of GPTs/LLMs because that amount of compute is expensive and at this point we know those will at least work.

I still think EC is fascinating and would love to play with it some more at some point, maybe trying it combined with back propagation in novel ways. Compute only gets cheaper.

Re: Bend: a high-level language that runs on GPUs (via HVM2)

#125

Post by hintymad »

Speaking of parallel computing, any book or series of books that can help an engineer learn parallel program and go from zero to hero? Ideally the books will cover both intuition, in-depth details, and theories. Something like The Art of Multiprocessor Programming by Herlihy et el for concurrent programming, even though the book arguably still has too steep of a learning curve.

Re: Bend: a high-level language that runs on GPUs (via HVM2)

#126

Post by jiehong »

abeppu wrote: post #71

I for one found the 'how is this possible' video near the bottom of the page to be unhelpful: - surely for `3 x 3 = 9`, there is some concept of primitive operations? - I get that replacement of patterns in a graph can be done in parallel, but (a) identifying when a rewrite rule should apply and (b) communicating the state of the updated graph to worker threads and (c) organizing worker threads to agree on which does…

The flip with Chinese characters in the middle tripped me. I guess they wanted to look like “complicated”…

Re: Bend: a high-level language that runs on GPUs (via HVM2)

#127

Post by shwestrick »

delu wrote: post #59

Ten years ago, I took a course on parallel algorithms (15-210 at CMU). It pitched parallelism as the future of computing as Moore's law would hit inevitable limits. I was sold and I was excited to experiment with it. Unfortunately, there weren't many options for general parallel programming. Even the language we used for class (SML) wasn't parallel (there was a section at the end about using extensions and CUDA but i…

Nowadays 210 is actually parallel! You can run 210-style code using MaPLe (https://github.com/MPLLang/mpl) and get competitive performance with respect to C/C++.

If you liked 210, you might also like https://futhark-lang.org/ which is an ML-family language that compiles to GPU with good performance.

Re: Bend: a high-level language that runs on GPUs (via HVM2)

#128

Post by andrewp123 »

I just wanted to comment on how good the homepage is - it's immediately clear what you do. Most people working with "combinators" would feel a need to use lots of scary lingo, but OP actually shows the simple idea behind the tool (this is the opposite take of most academics, who instead show every last detail and never tell you what's going on). I really appreciate it - we need more of this.
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