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

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

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 269 posts

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

#171

Post by Twirrim »

light_hue_1 wrote: post #146
glitchc wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have no dog in this fight, but feel compelled to defend the authors here. Recursion does not test compute, rather it tests the compiler's/interpreter's efficiency at standing up and tearing down the call stack. Clearly this language is positioned at using the gpu for compute-heavy applications and it's still in its early stages. Recursion is not the target application and should not be a relevant benchmark.

[flagged]

Okay, no. I know I called out performance in my post, but that was just from my observations. It surprised me to see something be that much slower than pure python. If you show me a near-python code example in a new language, as someone who mostly writes python code, I'm going to go and write it in python and see how it compares performance wise.

The authors never made any kind of false claims at all. You're reading a lot in to both their README and my post.

They've updated the README for a bit of clarity, but even re-reading the README as it was when I looked this morning (and even a few from before) it hasn't claimed to be fast. The claims are all related to the features that it does have, around parallelisation.

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

#172

Post by light_hue_1 »

rowanG077 wrote: post #162
light_hue_1 wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

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]

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

#174

Post by anon291 »

MrLeap wrote: post #138

This is incredible. This is the kind of work we need to crack open the under utilized GPUs out there. I know LLMs are all the rage, but there's more gold in them hills.

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 advantage of all the things that modern GPU-based BLAS implementations do (which is what I currently do), but would love to be surprised.

As a whole, the speedups claimed are not actually that great. Going from 1 core to 16k cores increases performance by 50x. That's not actually very good.

Like, I really truly love what the author has contributed to functional languages and Interaction Nets. He has good ideas, but while it's cool that this can be done, things like LLMs require very practical tuning.

Finally, the author has a history of making fantastical claims. Again, it's true there is a speedup, but in my view, this is like making an extremely slow language and then optimizing it and then announcing that you've figure out how to improve your language's performance by 50x. While true, it neglects the fact it was very slow to begin with.

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

#175

Post by light_hue_1 »

Twirrim wrote: post #171
light_hue_1 wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Okay, no. I know I called out performance in my post, but that was just from my observations. It surprised me to see something be that much slower than pure python. If you show me a near-python code example in a new language, as someone who mostly writes python code, I'm going to go and write it in python and see how it compares performance wise. The authors never made any kind of false claims at all. You're reading…

[flagged]

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

#176

Post by witherk »

ZitchDog wrote: post #173
egnehots wrote: post #61

the interesting comparison nowadays would be against mojo: https://www.modular.com/max/mojo

I think this is quite different- I don’t think mojo runs on the GPU unless I am mistaken.

Being able to compile to different hardware including GPUs and TPUs seems to be one of the core goals of Mojo based off what Chris Lattner was saying in his Lex Friendman interview. It doesn't seem to come up much on Modular website though, so I can see why you would think that.

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

#177

Post by LightMachine »

anon291 wrote: post #174
MrLeap wrote: post #138

This is incredible. This is the kind of work we need to crack open the under utilized GPUs out there. I know LLMs are all the rage, but there's more gold in them hills.

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!

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

#178

Post by riku_iki »

swayvil wrote: post #164
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 :/

The coolest things are often the most difficult to understand. Difficult to understand is often threatening. Criticism is a popular response to threat and is the form of reply that requires the least understanding.

it also could be half cooked and that's why criticism arrives.

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

#179

Post by swayvil »

riku_iki wrote: post #178
swayvil wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The coolest things are often the most difficult to understand. Difficult to understand is often threatening. Criticism is a popular response to threat and is the form of reply that requires the least understanding.

it also could be half cooked and that's why criticism arrives.

Like, on a bus?
Post reply on HN