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

161–170 of 211 posts

Re: Rust running on every GPU

#161

Post by trogdc »

bobajeff wrote: post #138
jpc0 wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hears an idea, Get Nvidia, AMD, Intel and whoever else you can get into a room. Get LLVMs boys into the same room. Compile LLVMIR directly into hardware instructions fed into the GPU, get them to open up. Having to target an API is part of the problem, get them to allow you to write Rust that directly compiles into the code that will run on the GPU, not something that becomes something else, that becomes spirv that c…

Sounds sort of like the idea behind MLIR and it's GPU dialects. * https://mlir.llvm.org/docs/Dialects/NVGPU/ * https://mlir.llvm.org/docs/Dialects/AMDGPU/ * https://mlir.llvm.org/docs/Dialects/XeGPU/

These are just wrappers around intrinsics that exist in LLVM already.

Re: Rust running on every GPU

#162

Post by dvtkrlbs »

tucnak wrote: post #63
tayo42 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes cuda nice in the first place?

All the things marked with red cross in the Rust-CUDA compatibility matrix. https://github.com/Rust-GPU/Rust-CUDA/blob/main/guide/src/fe...

I mean that will improve only with time though, No? Maintainers recently revived the rust-gpu and rust-cuda backends. I don't think even the maintainer would say this is ready for prime time. Another benefit is having able to run the same code (library aka crate) on the CPU and GPU. This would require really good optimization to be done on the GPU backend to have the full benefits but I definitely see the value proposition and the potential.

Re: Rust running on every GPU

#163

Post by dvtkrlbs »

Archit3ch wrote: post #44

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 optim…

The thing is you don't have to have the WebGPU layer in this with rust-gpu since it is a codegen backend for the compiler. You just compile the Rust MIR to SPIRV

Re: Rust running on every GPU

#164

Post by dvtkrlbs »

ducktective wrote: post #24
chrisldgk wrote: post #11

Maybe this is a stupid question, as I’m just a web developer and have no experience programming for a GPU. Doesn’t WebGPU solve this entire problem by having a single API that’s compatible with every GPU backend? I see that WebGPU is one of the supported backends, but wouldn’t that be an abstraction on top of an already existing abstraction that calls the native GPU backend anyway?

I think WebGPU is a like a minimum common API. Zed editor for Mac has targeted Metal directly. Also, people have different opinions on what "common" should mean. OpenGL vs Vulkan. Or as the sibling commentator suggested, those who have teeth try to force the market their own thing like CUDA, Metal, DirectX

Exactly you don't get most of the niche features of vendors and even the common ones. First to come in to mind is Ray Tracing (aka RTX) for example.

Re: Rust running on every GPU

#165

Post by dvtkrlbs »

boredatoms wrote: post #150
piker wrote: post #2

> Existing no_std + no alloc crates written for other purposes can generally run on the GPU without modification. Wow. That at first glance seems to unlock ALOT of interesting ideas.

I guess performance would be very different if things were initially assumed to run on a cpu

I think it could be improved a lot by niche optimization passes on the codegen backend. Kinda like the autovectorization and similar optimizations on the CPU backends.

Re: Rust running on every GPU

#166

Post by apitman »

LegNeato wrote: post #66
tucnak wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Folks" as-in Rust stans, whom know very little about CUDA and what makes it nice in the first place, sure, but is there demand for Rust ports amongst actual CUDA programmers? I think not.

FYI, rust-cuda outputs nvvm so it can integrate with the existing cuda ecosystem. We aren't suggesting rewriting everything in Rust. Check the repo for crates that allow using existing stuff like cudnn and cuBLAS.

Do you have a link? I went to the rust GPU repo and didn't see anything. I have an academic pipeline that currently heavily tied to CUDA because we need nvCOMP. Eventually we hope us or someone else makes an open source gzip library for GPUs. Until then it would at least be nice if we could implement our other pipeline stages in something more open.

Re: Rust running on every GPU

#167

Post by apitman »

dvtkrlbs wrote: post #162
tucnak wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All the things marked with red cross in the Rust-CUDA compatibility matrix. https://github.com/Rust-GPU/Rust-CUDA/blob/main/guide/src/fe...

I mean that will improve only with time though, No? Maintainers recently revived the rust-gpu and rust-cuda backends. I don't think even the maintainer would say this is ready for prime time. Another benefit is having able to run the same code (library aka crate) on the CPU and GPU. This would require really good optimization to be done on the GPU backend to have the full benefits but I definitely see the value propo…

Those red Xs represent libraries that only work on Nvidia GPUs and would represent a massive amount of work to re-implement in a cross-platform way, and you may never achieve the same performance either because of abstraction or because you can't match the engineering resources Nvidia has thrown at this the past decade. This is their moat.

I think open source alternatives will come in time, but it's a lot.

Re: Rust running on every GPU

#168

Post by [deleted] »

jpc0 wrote: post #126
LegNeato wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Hears an idea, Get Nvidia, AMD, Intel and whoever else you can get into a room. Get LLVMs boys into the same room. Compile LLVMIR directly into hardware instructions fed into the GPU, get them to open up. Having to target an API is part of the problem, get them to allow you to write Rust that directly compiles into the code that will run on the GPU, not something that becomes something else, that becomes spirv that c…

[deleted]

Re: Rust running on every GPU

#169

Post by johncolanduoni »

3836293648 wrote: post #86
ducktective wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

First of all WebGPU has only been supported in Chrome for a few months and Firefox in the next release. And that's just Windows. We haven't had enough time to develop anything really. Secondly, the WebGPU standard is like Vulkan 1.0 and is cumbersome to work with. But that part is hearsay, I don't have much experience with it.

WebGPU has been supported in stable Chrome for over 2 years. I'm also really not sure what about it is much like Vulkan 1.0 (or any other version). No manual allocations, no manual state transitions, almost no manual synchronization. If I had to pick another graphics API to compare it to in terms of abstraction level and exposed primitives, Metal 1 is probably the closest.
Post reply on HN