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

Rust running on every GPU

rust-gpu.github.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 211 posts

Re: Rust running on every GPU

#41

Post by the__alchemist »

kookamamie wrote: post #6
vouwfietsman wrote: post #3

Certainly impressive that this is possible! However, for my use cases (running on arbitrary client hardware) I generally distrust any abstractions over the GPU api, as the entire point is to leverage the low level details of the gpu. Treating those details as a nuisance leads to bugs and performance loss, because each target is meaningfully different. To overcome this, a similar system should be brought forward by th…

Exactly. Not sure why it would be better to run Rust on Nvidia GPUs compared to actual CUDA code. I get the idea of added abstraction, but do think it becomes a bit jack-of-all-tradesey.

I think the sweet spot is:

If your program is written in rust, use an abstraction like Cudarc to send and receive data from the GPU. Write normal CUDA kernels.

Re: Rust running on every GPU

#42

Post by Ar-Curunir »

kookamamie wrote: post #6
vouwfietsman wrote: post #3

Certainly impressive that this is possible! However, for my use cases (running on arbitrary client hardware) I generally distrust any abstractions over the GPU api, as the entire point is to leverage the low level details of the gpu. Treating those details as a nuisance leads to bugs and performance loss, because each target is meaningfully different. To overcome this, a similar system should be brought forward by th…

Exactly. Not sure why it would be better to run Rust on Nvidia GPUs compared to actual CUDA code. I get the idea of added abstraction, but do think it becomes a bit jack-of-all-tradesey.

Because folks like to program in Rust, not CUDA

Re: Rust running on every GPU

#43

Post by LegNeato »

Voultapher wrote: post #34

Let's count abstraction layers: 1. Domain specific Rust code 2. Backend abstracting over the cust, ash and wgpu crates 3. wgpu and co. abstracting over platforms, drivers and APIs 4. Vulkan, OpenGL, DX12 and Metal abstracting over platforms and drivers 5. Drivers abstracting over vendor specific hardware (one could argue there are more layers in here) 6. Hardware That's a lot of hidden complexity, better hope one nev…

The demo is admittedly a rube goldberg machine, but that's because this was the first time it is possible. It will get more integrated over time. And just like normal rust code, you can make it as abstract or concrete as you want. But at least you have the tools to do so.

That's one of the nice things about the rust ecosystem, you can drill down and do what you want. There is std::arch, which is platform specific, there is asm support, you can do things like replace the allocator and panic handler, etc. And with features coming like externally implemented items, it will be even more flexible to target what layer of abstraction you want

Re: Rust running on every GPU

#44

Post by Archit3ch »

I write native audio apps, where every cycle matters. I also need the full compute API instead of graphics shaders.

Is the "Rust -> WebGPU -> SPIR-V -> MSL -> Metal" pipeline robust when it come to performance? To me, it seems brittle and hard to reason about all these translation stages. Ditto for "... -> Vulkan -> MoltenVk -> ...".

Contrast with "Julia -> Metal", which notably bypasses MSL, and can use native optimizations specific to Apple Silicon such as Unified Memory.

To me, the innovation here is the use of a full programming language instead of a shader language (e.g. Slang). Rust supports newtype, traits, macros, and so on.

Re: Rust running on every GPU

#45

Post by LegNeato »

Voultapher wrote: post #38
LegNeato wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rust is a system language, so you should have the control you need. We intend to bring GPU details and APIs into the language and core / std lib, and expose GPU and driver stuff to the `cfg()` system. (Author here)

Who is we here? I'm curious to hear more about your ambitions here, since surly pulling in wgpu or something similar seems out-of-scope for the traditionally lean Rust stdlib.

Many of us working on Rust + GPUs in various projects have discussed starting a GPU working group to explore some of these questions:

https://gist.github.com/LegNeato/a1fb3e3a9795af05f22920709d9...

Agreed, I don't think we'd ever pull in things like wgpu, but we might create APIs or traits wgpu could use to improve perf/safety/ergonomics/interoperability.

Re: Rust running on every GPU

#46

Post by omnicognate »

nicoburns wrote: post #35
exDM69 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it does not. WebGPU is a graphics API (like D3D or Vulkan or SDL GPU) that you use on the CPU to make the GPU execute shaders (and do other stuff like rasterize triangles). Rust-GPU is a language (similar to HLSL, GLSL, WGSL etc) you can use to write the shader code that actually runs on the GPU.

This is a bit pedantic. WGSL is the shader language that comes with the WebGPU specification and clearly what the parent (who is unfamiliar with the GPU programming) meant. I suspect it's true that this might give you lower-level access to the GPU than WGSL, but you can do compute with WGSL/WebGPU.

Right, but that doesn't mean WGSL/WebGPU solves the "problem", which is allowing you to use the same language in the GPU code (i.e. the shaders) as the CPU code. You still have to use separate languages.

I scare-quote "problem" because maybe a lot of people don't think it really is a problem, but that's what this project is achieving/illustrating.

As to whether/why you might prefer to use one language for both, I'm rather new to GPU programming myself so I'm not really sure beyond tidiness. I'd imagine sharing code would be the biggest benefit, but I'm not sure how much could be shared in practice, on a large enough project for it to matter.

Re: Rust running on every GPU

#47

Post by pjmlp »

yupyupyups wrote: post #32
pjmlp wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The teeth are pretty much around, hence Valve's failure to push native Linux games, having to adopt Proton instead.

Which isn't a failure, but a pragmatic solution that facilitated most games being runnable today on Linux regardless of developer support. That's with good performance, mind you. For concrete examples, check out https://www.protondb.com/ That's a success.

Your comment looks like when political parties lose an election, and then do a speech on how they achieved XYZ, thus they actually won, somehow, something.

Re: Rust running on every GPU

#48

Post by pjmlp »

yupyupyups wrote: post #40
tonyhart7 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

that is not native

Maybe the fact that we have all these games running on Linux now, and as a result more gamers running Linux, developers will be more incentivized to consider native support for Linux too. Regardless, "native" is not the end-goal here. Consider Wine/Proton as an implementation of Windows libraries on Linux. Even if all binaries are not ELF-binaries, it's still not emulation or anything like that. :)

Why should they be incentivized to do anything, Valve takes care of the work, they can keep targeting good old Windows/DirectX as always.

OS/2 lesson has not yet been learnt.

Re: Rust running on every GPU

#50

Post by gedw99 »

I am over joyed to see this.

They are doing a huge service for developers that just want to build stuff and not get into the platform wars.

https://github.com/cogentcore/webgpu is a great example . I code in golang and just need stuff to work on everything and this gets it done, so I can use the GPU on everything.

Thank you rust !!

Post reply on HN