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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)

#231

Post by truckerbill »

LightMachine wrote: post #227
eating555 wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would be pretty appreciated if people criticize my project. That is how you grow. If people tend hide cruel truth behind applause, the world would just crumbled.

I really think I take criticism well... The problem is that people were criticizing us for not doing things that were literally done on the second paragraph. So at this point it didn't feel like productive criticism? That's like being criticized for being naked when you're full clothed. How do you even make sense of that...

People are more childish than they like to believe. It's a mix of jealousy and ignorant skepticism. What you're doing is incredibly interesting I look forward to seeing it develop!

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

#232

Post by anacrolix »

truckerbill wrote: post #231
LightMachine wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really think I take criticism well... The problem is that people were criticizing us for not doing things that were literally done on the second paragraph. So at this point it didn't feel like productive criticism? That's like being criticized for being naked when you're full clothed. How do you even make sense of that...

People are more childish than they like to believe. It's a mix of jealousy and ignorant skepticism. What you're doing is incredibly interesting I look forward to seeing it develop!

The fact that people compile summaries of discussions from HN comments like they've extracted gold shows the level of douchebaggery.

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

#233

Post by Laaas »

LightMachine wrote: post #177
anon291 wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except... it's not. Coming from a Haskell background and following the author since the early days, I think his work is excellent w.r.t Interaction Combinators and Nets. However, to do LLM work you need to cooperate with the chip, which means doing things in the manner most expeditious to the intricacies of Computer Architecture. That's not what this does. I don't see how Bend would modify its runtime to take advanta…

You're comparing CPU cores to GPU cores! It is "only" 50x because a single GPU core is 100x weaker than a CPU core! Within CUDA cores, it is actually a linear speedup! It does 2k MIPS with 1 CUDA core, and ~28000 MIPS with 16k CUDA cores. If we double the performance of single-core GPU evaluation, we almost double the performance with 16k cores!

2k MIPS is 2 GIPS, no?

Great work BTW

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

#234

Post by magicalhippo »

> Everything that can run in parallel, will run in parallel.

On the CPU, there's typically a threshold where dividing and coordinating the parallel work takes more time than simply doing the work on a single thread. Thus you can make the overall runtime much faster by not dividing the work all the way, but rather stop at that optimal threshold and then just loop over the remaining work in the worker threads.

How does this work on the GPU using Bend? Been too long since I did any GPU programming.

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

#235

Post by treme »

LightMachine wrote: post #227
eating555 wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would be pretty appreciated if people criticize my project. That is how you grow. If people tend hide cruel truth behind applause, the world would just crumbled.

I really think I take criticism well... The problem is that people were criticizing us for not doing things that were literally done on the second paragraph. So at this point it didn't feel like productive criticism? That's like being criticized for being naked when you're full clothed. How do you even make sense of that...

You are doing superb. Just remind your self there are people that think Elon is incompetent despite TESLA and SpaceX.

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

#236

Post by alcidesfonseca »

LightMachine wrote: post #119
vrmiguel wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's true, you never mentioned Python or alternatives in your README, I guess I got Mandela'ed from the comments in Hacker News, so my bad on that. People are naturally going to compare the timings and function you cite to what's available to the community right now, though, that's the only way we can picture its performance in real-life tasks. > Mojo or other languages, specifically because it generates hate Mojo…

Thanks, and I apologize if I got defensive, it is just that I put so much effort on being truthful, double-checking, putting disclaimers everywhere about every possible misinterpretation. Hell this is behind install instructions: > our code gen is still on its infancy, and is nowhere as mature as SOTA compilers like GCC and GHC Yet people still misinterpret. It is frustrating because I don't know what I could've done…

I think the (hidden) reasoning is that it is really easy to have speedups with slow interpreters. However, getting speedups in high-performance level programs is quite hard, mainly due to micro-optimisations.

That's where the comparison to Python comes from: getting speedup on slow interpreters is not very _relevant_. Now if your interpreter has the same optimisations as Python (or v8 or JVM), even a small fraction of what you show would be impressive.

Having said this, the work your team did is a really challenging engineering feat (and with lot more potential). But I do not believe the current speedups will hold if the interpreter/compilers have the level of optimisation that exist in other languages. And while you do not claim it, people expect that.

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

#237

Post by csirac2 »

light_hue_1 wrote: post #172
rowanG077 wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes and those benchmarks are real. Showing linear speed up in the number cores when writing standard code is a real achievement. If you assumed that somehow means this is a state of the art compiler with super blazing performance is on no one but you. The readme lays it out very clearly.

[flagged]

If you want to bring up CS101 so badly, surely turing machines and lambda calculus would be more relevant.

The actually interesting claim is that somebody has found a practical use for Interaction Combinators as a computing model for putting GPUs to work.

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

#238

Post by Certhas »

LightMachine wrote: post #91
vrmiguel wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it is allocating 2 IC nodes for each numeric operation, while Python is not While that's true, Python would be using big integers (PyLongObject) for most of the computations, meaning every number gets allocated on the heap. If we use a Python implementation that would avoid this, like PyPy or Cython, the results change significantly: % cat sum.py def sum(depth, x): if depth == 0: return x else: fst = sum(depth-1, x…

The only claim I made is that it scales linearly with cores. Nothing else! I'm personally putting a LOT of effort to make our claims as accurate and truthful as possible, in every single place. Documentation, website, demos. I spent hours in meetings to make sure everything is correct. Yet, sometimes it feels that no matter how much effort I put, people will just find ways to misinterpret it. We published the real be…

I think you were being absolutely precise, but I want to give a tiny bit of constructive feedback anyway:

In my experience, to not be misunderstood it is more important to understand the state of mind/frame of reference of your audience, than to be utterly precise.

The problem is, if you have been working on something for a while, it is extremely hard to understand how the world looks to someone who has never seen it (1).

The second problem is that when you hit a site like hacker News your audience is impossibly diverse, and there isn't any one state of mind.

When I present research, it always takes many iterations of reflecting on both points to get to a good place.

(1) https://xkcd.com/2501/

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

#239

Post by joshsyn »

imranq wrote: post #202
CorrectingYou wrote: post #115

OP comes around with some of the coolest things posted in HN recently, and all he gets is extensive criticism, when it is clear that this is an early version :/

I think HN is a community where people want to post something novel or new. When someone wants to post a kudos, most likely they'll upvote someone else instead of posting yet another "awesome job" (even if it is certainly warranted). Criticism instead can be endlessly diverse since there's usually only limited number ways to get it right, but plenty to get wrong. In the end, HN comments fall prey to this truth and yo…

[dead]

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

#240

Post by LightMachine »

kmacdough wrote: post #229
LightMachine wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks, and I apologize if I got defensive, it is just that I put so much effort on being truthful, double-checking, putting disclaimers everywhere about every possible misinterpretation. Hell this is behind install instructions: > our code gen is still on its infancy, and is nowhere as mature as SOTA compilers like GCC and GHC Yet people still misinterpret. It is frustrating because I don't know what I could've done…

Don't optimize for minimum hate, optimize for actionable feedback and ignore the haters. Easier said than done, though. Remember you don't need comment trolls on your team, and you'll go insane taking them seriously. Focus on piquing the interest of motivated language nerds. I personally would have really appreciated a "look, were still 10x (or whatever) slower than Python, so now I need all the help I can get workin…

I agree...

Just a note: we are NOT 10x slower than Python. I think a lot of people got the wrong message from this thread. HVM is actually quite fast already. It is just that, on this specific program, Python was doing no allocations, while HVM was allocating a lot.

If you compare programs that do the same allocation, HVM already outperforms not just Python but even compiled languages like Haskell/GHC, due to using all cores. See the Bitonic Sort example. And that's extremely relevant, because real world programs in high-level languages allocate a lot!

I think I made a huge mistake of using a "sum" example on the GUIDE, since it is actually one of the few specific programs where HVM will do poorly today.

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