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I want a good parallel computer

raphlinus.github.io

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Re: I want a good parallel computer

#181

Post by btreecat »

deviantbit wrote: post #169
pca006132 wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While financial incentives is important to some, a lot of people write books to share their knowledge and give the book out for free. I think more people are doing this now, and there are also open collaborative textbook projects. And I personally think that it is weird to write books during your working hour, and also get monet from selling that book.

"financial incentives" This is the most ignorant response I've seen yet. We don't expect monetary gain from publishing a book. We expect our costs to be covered. This is about the consumer, not the publisher. If we lived in a socialist system, they would still pirate our publications and we will still be in debt over it.

That's a financial incentive, I'm not sure what your rejection is exactly.

Re: I want a good parallel computer

#182

Post by jpc0 »

grg0 wrote: post #19

The issue is that programming a discrete GPU feels like programming a printer over a COM port, just with higher bandwidths. It's an entirely moronic programming model to be using in 2025. - You need to compile shader source/bytecode at runtime; you can't just "run" a program. - On NUMA/discrete, the GPU cannot just manipulate the data structures the CPU already has; gotta copy the whole thing over. And you better des…

I really would like you to sketch out the DX you are expecting here, purely for my understanding of what it is you are looking for.

I find needing to write seperate code in a different language annoying but the UX of it is very explicit of what is happening in the memory which is very useful. With really high performance compute across multiple cores ensuring you don't get arbitrary cache misses is a pain. If we could address CPUs like we address current GPUs( well you can but it's not generally done) it would make it much much simpler.

Want to alter something in parallel, copy it to memory allocated to a specific core which is guaranteed to only be addressed by that core and the do the operations on it.

To do that currently you need to be pedantic about alignment and manually indicate thread affinity to the scheduler etc. Which ia entirely as annoying as GPU programming.

Re: I want a good parallel computer

#183

Post by hulitu »

raphlinus wrote: post #88
armchairhacker wrote: post #2

> The GPU in your computer is about 10 to 100 times more powerful than the CPU, depending on workload. For real-time graphics rendering and machine learning, you are enjoying that power, and doing those workloads on a CPU is not viable. Why aren’t we exploiting that power for other workloads? What prevents a GPU from being a more general purpose computer? What other workloads would benefit from a GPU? Computers are s…

Possibly compilation and linking. That's very slow for big programs like Chromium. There's really interesting work on GPU compilers (co-dfns and Voetter's work). Optimization problems like scheduling and circuit routing. Search in theorem proving (the classical parts like model checking, not just LLM). There's still a lot that is slow and should be faster, or at the very least made to run using less power. GPUs are g…

> Possibly compilation and linking. That's very slow for big programs like Chromium.

So instead of fixing the problem (Chromium's bloat) we just trow more memory and computing power at it, hopping that the problem will go away.

Maybe we shall teach programmers to programm. /s

Re: I want a good parallel computer

#184

Post by graemep »

api wrote: post #56
deviantbit wrote: post #49

"I believe there are two main things holding it back." He really science’d the heck out of that one. I’m getting tired of seeing opinions dressed up as insight—especially when they’re this detached from how real systems actually work. I worked on the Cell processor and I can tell you it was a nightmare. It demanded an unrealistic amount of micromanagement and gave developers rope to hang themselves with. There’s a re…

On flattening address spaces: the road not taken here is to run everything in something akin to the JVM, CLR, or WASM. Do that stuff in software not hardware. You could also do things like having the JIT optimize the entire running system dynamically like one program, eliminating syscall and context switch overhead not to mention most MMU overhead. Would it be faster? Maybe. The JIT would have to generate its own saf…

We end up relying on software for this so much anyway. Your examples plus the use of containers and the like at OS level.

Re: I want a good parallel computer

#185

Post by hulitu »

Animats wrote: post #32

Interesting article. Other than as an exercise, it's not clear why someone would write a massively parallel 2D renderer that needs a GPU. Modern GPUs are overkill for 2D. Now, 3D renderers, we need all the help we can get. In this context, a "renderer" is something that takes in meshes, textures, materials, transforms, and objects, and generates images. It's not an entire game development engine, such as Unreal, Unit…

> Modern GPUs are overkill for 2D

That explains why modern GUI are crap: because they are not able to draw a bloody rectangle, and fill it with colour. /s

Re: I want a good parallel computer

#186

Post by hulitu »

archagon wrote: post #104
Animats wrote: post #32

Interesting article. Other than as an exercise, it's not clear why someone would write a massively parallel 2D renderer that needs a GPU. Modern GPUs are overkill for 2D. Now, 3D renderers, we need all the help we can get. In this context, a "renderer" is something that takes in meshes, textures, materials, transforms, and objects, and generates images. It's not an entire game development engine, such as Unreal, Unit…

I think a dynamic, fully vector-based 2D interface with fluid zoom and transformations at 120Hz+ is going to need all the GPU help it can get. Take mapping as an example: even Google Maps routinely struggles with performance on a top-of-the-line iPhone.

> even Google Maps routinely struggles with performance on a top-of-the-line iPhone.

It has to download the jpegs.

Re: I want a good parallel computer

#187

Post by Ericson2314 »

Agreed with the premise here

I have never done GPU programming or graphics, but what feels frustating looking from the outside is the designs and constraints seems so arbitrary. They don't feel like they come from actual hardware constraints/problems. It just looks like pure path dependency going all the way back to the fixed-function days, with tons of accidental complexity and and half-finished generalizations ever since.

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