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Rust running on every GPU

rust-gpu.github.io

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Re: Rust running on every GPU

#101

Post by bwfan123 »

slashdev wrote: post #76

This is a little crude still, but the fact that this is even possible is mind blowing. This has the potential, if progress continues, to break the vendor-locked nightmare that is GPU software and open up the space to real competition between hardware vendors. Imagine a world where machine learning models are written in Rust and can run on both Nvidia and AMD. To get max performance you likely have to break the abstra…

> Imagine a world where machine learning models are written in Rust and can run on both Nvidia and AMD

Not likely in the next decade if ever. Unfortunately, the entire ecosystems of jax and torch are python based. Imagine retraining all those devs to use rust tooling.

Re: Rust running on every GPU

#102

Post by junon »

LegNeato wrote: post #45
Voultapher wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm surprised there isn't already a Rust GPU WG. That'd be incredible.

Re: Rust running on every GPU

#103

Post by Ygg2 »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #99
ajross wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is absolutely an xkcd 927 feel to this. But that's not the fault of the new abstraction layers, it's the fault of the GPU industry and its outrageous refusal to coordinate on anything, at all, ever. Every generation of GPU from every vendor has its own toolchain, its own ideas about architecture, its own entirely hidden and undocumented set of quirks, its own secret sauce interfaces available only in its own in…

In fairness, the ability to restructure at will probably does make it easier to improve things.

Improve things for who?

Re: Rust running on every GPU

#104

Post by MindSpunk »

ducktective wrote: post #78
pjmlp wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Khronos APIs are the C++ of graphics programming, there is a reason why professional game studios never do political wars on APIs. Decades of exerience building cross platform game engines since the days of raw assembly programming across heterogeneous computer architectures. What matters are game design and IP, that they eventually can turn into physical assets like toys, movies, collection assets. Hardware abstract…

I think you are very experienced in this subject. Can you explain what's wrong with WebGPU? Doesn't it utilize like 80% of the cool features of the modern GPUs? Games and ambitious graphics-hungry applications aside, why aren't we seeing more tech built on top of WebGPU like GUI stacks? Why aren't we seeing browsers and web apps using it? Do you recommended learning it (considering all the things worth learning nowad…

WebGPU is about a decade behind in feature support compared to what is available in modern GPUs. Things missing include:

- Bindless resources

- RT acceleration

- 64-bit image atomic operations (these are what make nanite's software rasterizer possible)

- mesh shaders

It has compute shaders at least. There's a lot of less flashy to non-experts extensions being added to Vulkan and D3D12 lately that removes abstractions that WebGPU cant have without being a security nightmare. Outside of the rendering algorithms themselves, the vast majority of API surface area in Vulkan/D3D12 is just ceremony around allocating memory for different purposes. New stuff like descriptor buffers in Vulkan are removing that ceremony in a very core area, but its unlikely to ever come to WebGPU.

fwiw some of these features are available outside the browser via 'wgpu' and/or 'dawn', but that doesn't help people in the browser.

Re: Rust running on every GPU

#105

Post by dotancohen »

ecshafer wrote: post #91
dotancohen wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I suppose GPUs are slowly going through a similar process now that they're useful in many more domains than just graphics. I've been waiting for the G in GPU to be replaced with something else since the first CUDA releases. I honestly think that once we rename this tech, more people will learn to use it.

MPU - Matrix Processing Unit LAPU - Linear Algebra Processing Unit

LAPU is terrific. It also means paw in Russian.

Re: Rust running on every GPU

#107

Post by Voultapher »

LegNeato wrote: post #45
Voultapher wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Cool, looking forward to that. It's certainly a good fit for the Rust story overall, given the increasingly heterogenous nature of systems.

Re: Rust running on every GPU

#108

Post by ajross »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #99
ajross wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is absolutely an xkcd 927 feel to this. But that's not the fault of the new abstraction layers, it's the fault of the GPU industry and its outrageous refusal to coordinate on anything, at all, ever. Every generation of GPU from every vendor has its own toolchain, its own ideas about architecture, its own entirely hidden and undocumented set of quirks, its own secret sauce interfaces available only in its own in…

In fairness, the ability to restructure at will probably does make it easier to improve things.

The fact that the upper parts of the stack are so commoditized (i.e. CUDA and WGSL do not in fact represent particularly different modes of computation, and of course the linked article shows that you can drive everything pretty well with scalar rust code) argues strongly against that. Things aren't incompatible because of innovation, they're incompatible because of expedience and paranoia.

Re: Rust running on every GPU

#109

Post by pornel »

nicoburns wrote: post #90
ants_everywhere wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Genuine question since you seem to care about the performance: As an outsider, where we are with GPUs looks a lot like where we were with CPUs many years ago. And (AFAIK), the solution there was three-part compilers where optimizations happen on a middle layer and the third layer transforms the optimized code to run directly on the hardware. A major upside is that the compilers get smarter over time because the abstr…

The status quo in GPU-land seems to be that the compiler lives in the GPU driver and is largely opaque to everyone other than the OS/GPU vendors. Sometimes there is an additional layer of compiler in user land that compilers into the language that the driver-compiler understands. I think a lot of people would love to move to the CPU model where the actual hardware instructions are documented and relatively stable bet…

I would like CPUs to move to the GPU model, because in the CPU land adoption of wider SIMD instructions (without manual dispatch/multiversioning faff) takes over a decade, while in the GPU land it's a driver update.

To be clear, I'm talking about the PTX -> SASS compilation (which is something like LLVM bitcode to x86-64 microcode compilation). The fragmented and messy high-level shader language compilers are a different thing, in the higher abstraction layers.

Re: Rust running on every GPU

#110

Post by max-privatevoid »

zbentley wrote: post #70
max-privatevoid wrote: post #65

It would be great if Rust people learned how to properly load GPU libraries first.

Say more?

Rust GPU libraries such as wgpu and ash rely on external libraries such as vulkan-loader to load the actual ICDs, but for some reason Rust people really love dlopening them instead of linking to them normally. Then it's up to the consumer to configure their linker flags correctly so RPATH gets set correctly when needed, but because most people don't know how to use their linker, they usually end up with dumb hacks like these instead:

https://github.com/Rust-GPU/rust-gpu/blob/87ea628070561f576a...

https://github.com/gfx-rs/wgpu/blob/bf86ac3489614ed2b212ea2f...

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