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trying to add some more context but I was limited to 80 characters. These guys can explain it much better than me: https://www.khronos.org/vulkan https://www.
by gnarbarian 11y ago
trying to add some more context but I was limited to 80 characters.
These guys can explain it much better than me:
https://www.khronos.org/vulkan https://www.khronos.org/vulkan
my excited fanboyish rant:
It's an open source cross-platform performance oriented heterogeneous computing API that enables you to build fast low level code that does a good job of supporting massive GPU style concurrency as well as CPU style threads and switch between them at runtime.
With this API it will be easier to write fast parallel code that will make the most of whatever hardware is available while breaking down the barriers that arise when managing threads on both system and GPU memory.
In my opinion it is the foundation for the next generation of HPC. I am interested in this from a performance and from a language perspective. I'd like to see things like PyCuda and PyOpenCL for vulkan and hooks into other higher level languages like Go.
Maybe even whole new languages/runtimes built using the vulkan API as the foundation.
I know I sound a little crazy here but this is something I've been waiting for for many years. Ever since I ran into issues with cuda and opencl.
- douche 11y agoAh, that 80-char limit is irritating... I would love to see Vulkan take off and get good adoption. Ultimately, though, it's going to come down to how good the driver support is, I think. If there is a serious effort and buy-in from the major vendors and OS providers, then it might take off. Otherwise, it might just be another thing, and contribute to the fragmentation in the GPU space. Will Apple continue with their Metal platform, instead of, or in addition to Vulkan? Microsoft will back DirectX 12 by default, and if it is a situation where NVidia or AMD or Intel have to provide decent Windows Vulkan drivers, we're back to the same situation OpenGL is in. I don't know enough about the situation in Android-land. General-purpose GPU usage is interesting, but if Vulkan is going to gain mindshare, game developers are the ones that are going to have to pick it over any of the alternatives.
- gnarbarian 11y agoGame devs are always the first ones aren't they? Valve is on board: http://wccftech.com/vulkan-reason-create-dx12-backend-valves-ginsburg/ http://wccftech.com/vulkan-reason-create-dx12-backend-valves... Nvidia is on board: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NVIDIA-Vulkan-Nearing-Release https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NVIDIA-V... Google is onboard for Android: http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/08/android-to-support-vulkan-graphics-api-the-open-answer-to-metal-and-dx12/ http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/08/android-to-support-vu... Of course it's too early to know if it will get traction but I am stoked to get a chance to play around with the API. I have a few simulations that no longer work in PyOpenCL and I'm dying to try porting them to something like vulkan. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lnOmy1ly6M0&list=PLCN-Ml6vUJ-JTiqdvcHd0vZVSXDpw_RcW https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lnOmy1ly6M0&list=PLCN-Ml6vUJ...
- jevinskie 11y agoThat n-body simulation is very cool.
- gnarbarian 11y agothanks! Here's the archived google code project page containing everything: https://code.google.com/p/stableorbit/ https://code.google.com/p/stableorbit/ But I suspect you'd be more interested in the Github branch if you felt like taking a look at how I and a friend butchered some pyopencl example code and got it working: https://github.com/ubernaut/stableorbit/tree/pyopencl-nbody https://github.com/ubernaut/stableorbit/tree/pyopencl-nbody