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FWIW, I took “GPUs are deterministic” to mean they are deterministic in all possible intended use cases. This is not strictly true, since the whole point of us
by thaw13579 3y ago
FWIW, I took “GPUs are deterministic” to mean they are deterministic in all possible intended use cases. This is not strictly true, since the whole point of using them is massive parallelism, which brings along non-determinism, for reasons that others have noted. Of course it’s possible to choose to forego that, but what is the point of a GPU in that case?
- xyzzy_plugh 3y agoThis is a false dichotomy. You can have massive parallelism and determinism. You can trade determinism for convenience, but that doesn't make things easier: now you have to deal with the determinism. But to suggest that massive parallelism somehow implies non-determinism is quite disingenuous from my perspective. We have mutexes and lock-free ring buffers and stable sorts and all sorts of bells and whistles to make parallelism safe elsewhere. We also already have tools to solve this for GPUs.