4 ms·

As of this year (ish), `int main() {puts("hello, world\n");}` stands a decent chance of running on a GPU and doing the right thing if you compile it with clang.

As of this year (ish), `int main() {puts("hello, world\n");}` stands a decent chance of running on a GPU and doing the right thing if you compile it with clang. Terminal application style. Should be able to spell it printf shortly, variadic functions turn out to be a bit of a mess.

KeplerBoy 3y ago
Do you happen to have a link to these developments?
- JonChesterfield 3y ago
  Documentation is lagging reality a bit, we'll probably fix that around the next llvm release. Some information is at https://libc.llvm.org/gpu/using.html https://libc.llvm.org/gpu/using.html That GPU libc is mostly intended to bring things like fopen to openmp or cuda, but it turns out GPUs are totally usable as bare metal embedded targets. You can read/write to "host" memory, on that and a thread running on the host you can implement a syscall equivalent (e.g. https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3458744.3473357 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3458744.3473357), and once you have syscall the doors are wide open. I particularly like mmap from GPU kernels.
  - KeplerBoy 3y ago
    This is super interesting, thanks!
  - keldaris 3y ago
    Is there a way to directly use these developments to already write a reasonable subset of C/C++ for simpler usecases (basically doing some compute and showing the results on screen by just manipulating pixels in a buffer like you would with a fragment/pixel shader) in a way that's portable (across the three major desktop platforms, at least) without dealing with cumbersome non-portable APIs like OpenGL, OpenCL, DirectX, Metal or CUDA? This doesn't require anything close to full libc functionality (let alone anything like the STL), but would greatly improve the ergonomics for a lot of developers.
    - JonChesterfield 3y ago
      I'll describe what we've got, but fair warning that I don't know how the write pixels to the screen stuff works on GPUs. There are some instructions with weird names that I assume make sense in that context. Presumably one allocates memory and writes to it in some fashion. LLVM libc is picking up capability over time, implemented similarly to the non-gpu architectures. The same tests run on x64 or the GPU, printing to stdout as they go. Hopefully standing up libc++ on top will work smoothly. It's encouraging that I sometimes struggle to remember whether it's currently running on the host or the GPU. The datastructure that libc uses to have x64 call a function on amdgpu, or to have amdgpu call a function on x64, is mostly a blob of shared memory and careful atomic operations. That was originally general purpose and lived on a prototypey GitHub. Its currently specialised to libc. It should end up in an under-debate llvm/offload project which will make it easily reusable again. This isn't quite decoupled from vendor stuff. The GPU driver needs to be running in the kernel somewhere. On nvptx, we make a couple of calls into libcuda to launch main(). On amdgpu, it's a couple of calls into libhsa. I did have an opencl loader implementation as well but that has probably rotted, intel seems to be on that stack but isn't in llvm upstream. A few GPU projects have noticed that implementing a cuda layer and a spirv layer and a hsa or hip layer and whatever others is quite annoying. Possibly all GPU projects have noticed that. We may get an llvm/offload library that successfully abstracts over those which would let people allocate memory, launch kernels, use arbitrary libc stuff and so forth running against that library. That's all from the compute perspective. It's possible I should look up what sending numbers over HDMI actually is. I believe the GPU is happy interleaving compute and graphics kernels and suspect they're very similar things in the implementation.
    - pjmlp 3y ago
      CUDA allows for straight C++ for quite some time, that is how renderers like nanite are written. https://docs.nvidia.com/cuda/cuda-c-std/index.html https://docs.nvidia.com/cuda/cuda-c-std/index.html "C++ Standard Parallelism" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwrgLH5yAlM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwrgLH5yAlM Or if you prefer more vendor neutral, https://registry.khronos.org/SYCL/specs/sycl-2020/html/sycl-2020.html https://registry.khronos.org/SYCL/specs/sycl-2020/html/sycl-... Currently with C++17 support.
pjmlp 3y ago
CUDA already does printf, and C++20 support, minus modules.
- JonChesterfield 3y ago
  C++20 would be news to me. Do you have a reference? The closest I can find is https://github.com/NVIDIA/cccl https://github.com/NVIDIA/cccl which seems to be atomic and bits of algorithm. E.g. can you point to unordered_map that works on the target? I think some pieces of libc++ work but don't know of any testing or documentation effort to track what parts, nor of any explicit handling in the source tree.
  - SubjectToChange 3y ago
    IIRC, CUDA Toolkit 12.0 added partial support for C++20 in nvcc and nvrtc.
  - pjmlp 3y ago
    Yes, it is right there on the documentation. https://docs.nvidia.com/cuda/cuda-c-programming-guide/index.html#c-20-language-features https://docs.nvidia.com/cuda/cuda-c-programming-guide/index.... Existing restrictions, https://docs.nvidia.com/cuda/cuda-c-programming-guide/index.html#cpp20 https://docs.nvidia.com/cuda/cuda-c-programming-guide/index....
    - JonChesterfield 3y ago
      Well, the docs say C++ support. There's a reference to <type_traits> and a lot of limitations on what you can do with lambda. I don't see supporting evidence that the rest of libc++ exists. I think what they mean is some syntax from C++20 is implemented, but the C++ library is not. By "run C on the GPU" I'm thinking of taking programs and compiling them for the GPU. The lua interpreter, sqlite, stuff like that. I'm personally interested in running llvm on one. Not taking existing code, deleting almost all uses of libc or libc++ from it, then strategically annotating it with host/device/global noise and partitioning it into host and target programs with explicit data transfer. That is, I don't consider "you can port it to cuda with some modern C++ syntax" to be "you can run C++", what with them being different languages and all. So it doesn't look like Nvidia have beaten us to shipping this yet. Thank you for the reference. Edit: a better link might be https://nvidia.github.io/libcudacxx/standard_api.html https://nvidia.github.io/libcudacxx/standard_api.html which shows an effort to port libc++, but it's early days for it. No STL data structures in there.
krackers 3y ago
What does that do under the hood though? What does it mean to execute puts from a GPU?
- JonChesterfield 3y ago
  Libc on x64 is roughly a bunch of userspace code over syscall which traps into the kernel. Looks like a function that takes six integer registers and writes results to some of those same registers. Libc on nvptx or amdgpu is a bunch of userspace code over syscall, which is a function that takes eight integers per lane on the GPU. That "syscall" copies those integers to the x64/host/other architecture. You'll find it in a header called rpc.h, the same code compiled on host or GPU. Sometime later a thread on the host reads those integers, does whatever they asked for (e.g. call the host syscall on the next six integers), possibly copies values back. Puts probably copies the string to the host 7*8 bytes at a time, reassembles it on the host, then passes it to the host implementation of puts. We should be able to kill the copy on some architectures. Some other functions run wholly on the GPU, e.g. sprintf shouldn't talk to the host, but fprintf will need to. The GPU libc is fun from a design perspective because it can run code on either side of that communication channel as we see fit. E.g. printf floating point handling seems prone to large numbers of registers needed on the GPU at the moment so we may move some work to the host to make the register usage better (higher occupancy).

KeplerBoy 3y ago

Do you happen to have a link to these developments?

JonChesterfield 3y ago
Documentation is lagging reality a bit, we'll probably fix that around the next llvm release. Some information is at https://libc.llvm.org/gpu/using.html https://libc.llvm.org/gpu/using.html That GPU libc is mostly intended to bring things like fopen to openmp or cuda, but it turns out GPUs are totally usable as bare metal embedded targets. You can read/write to "host" memory, on that and a thread running on the host you can implement a syscall equivalent (e.g. https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3458744.3473357 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3458744.3473357), and once you have syscall the doors are wide open. I particularly like mmap from GPU kernels.
- KeplerBoy 3y ago
  This is super interesting, thanks!
- keldaris 3y ago
  Is there a way to directly use these developments to already write a reasonable subset of C/C++ for simpler usecases (basically doing some compute and showing the results on screen by just manipulating pixels in a buffer like you would with a fragment/pixel shader) in a way that's portable (across the three major desktop platforms, at least) without dealing with cumbersome non-portable APIs like OpenGL, OpenCL, DirectX, Metal or CUDA? This doesn't require anything close to full libc functionality (let alone anything like the STL), but would greatly improve the ergonomics for a lot of developers.
  - JonChesterfield 3y ago
    I'll describe what we've got, but fair warning that I don't know how the write pixels to the screen stuff works on GPUs. There are some instructions with weird names that I assume make sense in that context. Presumably one allocates memory and writes to it in some fashion. LLVM libc is picking up capability over time, implemented similarly to the non-gpu architectures. The same tests run on x64 or the GPU, printing to stdout as they go. Hopefully standing up libc++ on top will work smoothly. It's encouraging that I sometimes struggle to remember whether it's currently running on the host or the GPU. The datastructure that libc uses to have x64 call a function on amdgpu, or to have amdgpu call a function on x64, is mostly a blob of shared memory and careful atomic operations. That was originally general purpose and lived on a prototypey GitHub. Its currently specialised to libc. It should end up in an under-debate llvm/offload project which will make it easily reusable again. This isn't quite decoupled from vendor stuff. The GPU driver needs to be running in the kernel somewhere. On nvptx, we make a couple of calls into libcuda to launch main(). On amdgpu, it's a couple of calls into libhsa. I did have an opencl loader implementation as well but that has probably rotted, intel seems to be on that stack but isn't in llvm upstream. A few GPU projects have noticed that implementing a cuda layer and a spirv layer and a hsa or hip layer and whatever others is quite annoying. Possibly all GPU projects have noticed that. We may get an llvm/offload library that successfully abstracts over those which would let people allocate memory, launch kernels, use arbitrary libc stuff and so forth running against that library. That's all from the compute perspective. It's possible I should look up what sending numbers over HDMI actually is. I believe the GPU is happy interleaving compute and graphics kernels and suspect they're very similar things in the implementation.
  - pjmlp 3y ago
    CUDA allows for straight C++ for quite some time, that is how renderers like nanite are written. https://docs.nvidia.com/cuda/cuda-c-std/index.html https://docs.nvidia.com/cuda/cuda-c-std/index.html "C++ Standard Parallelism" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwrgLH5yAlM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwrgLH5yAlM Or if you prefer more vendor neutral, https://registry.khronos.org/SYCL/specs/sycl-2020/html/sycl-2020.html https://registry.khronos.org/SYCL/specs/sycl-2020/html/sycl-... Currently with C++17 support.

pjmlp 3y ago

CUDA already does printf, and C++20 support, minus modules.

JonChesterfield 3y ago
C++20 would be news to me. Do you have a reference? The closest I can find is https://github.com/NVIDIA/cccl https://github.com/NVIDIA/cccl which seems to be atomic and bits of algorithm. E.g. can you point to unordered_map that works on the target? I think some pieces of libc++ work but don't know of any testing or documentation effort to track what parts, nor of any explicit handling in the source tree.
- SubjectToChange 3y ago
  IIRC, CUDA Toolkit 12.0 added partial support for C++20 in nvcc and nvrtc.
- pjmlp 3y ago
  Yes, it is right there on the documentation. https://docs.nvidia.com/cuda/cuda-c-programming-guide/index.html#c-20-language-features https://docs.nvidia.com/cuda/cuda-c-programming-guide/index.... Existing restrictions, https://docs.nvidia.com/cuda/cuda-c-programming-guide/index.html#cpp20 https://docs.nvidia.com/cuda/cuda-c-programming-guide/index....
  - JonChesterfield 3y ago
    Well, the docs say C++ support. There's a reference to <type_traits> and a lot of limitations on what you can do with lambda. I don't see supporting evidence that the rest of libc++ exists. I think what they mean is some syntax from C++20 is implemented, but the C++ library is not. By "run C on the GPU" I'm thinking of taking programs and compiling them for the GPU. The lua interpreter, sqlite, stuff like that. I'm personally interested in running llvm on one. Not taking existing code, deleting almost all uses of libc or libc++ from it, then strategically annotating it with host/device/global noise and partitioning it into host and target programs with explicit data transfer. That is, I don't consider "you can port it to cuda with some modern C++ syntax" to be "you can run C++", what with them being different languages and all. So it doesn't look like Nvidia have beaten us to shipping this yet. Thank you for the reference. Edit: a better link might be https://nvidia.github.io/libcudacxx/standard_api.html https://nvidia.github.io/libcudacxx/standard_api.html which shows an effort to port libc++, but it's early days for it. No STL data structures in there.

krackers 3y ago

What does that do under the hood though? What does it mean to execute puts from a GPU?

JonChesterfield 3y ago
Libc on x64 is roughly a bunch of userspace code over syscall which traps into the kernel. Looks like a function that takes six integer registers and writes results to some of those same registers. Libc on nvptx or amdgpu is a bunch of userspace code over syscall, which is a function that takes eight integers per lane on the GPU. That "syscall" copies those integers to the x64/host/other architecture. You'll find it in a header called rpc.h, the same code compiled on host or GPU. Sometime later a thread on the host reads those integers, does whatever they asked for (e.g. call the host syscall on the next six integers), possibly copies values back. Puts probably copies the string to the host 7*8 bytes at a time, reassembles it on the host, then passes it to the host implementation of puts. We should be able to kill the copy on some architectures. Some other functions run wholly on the GPU, e.g. sprintf shouldn't talk to the host, but fprintf will need to. The GPU libc is fun from a design perspective because it can run code on either side of that communication channel as we see fit. E.g. printf floating point handling seems prone to large numbers of registers needed on the GPU at the moment so we may move some work to the host to make the register usage better (higher occupancy).