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A better question is why there is no stronger push for a nicer GPU language that's not tied to any particular GPU and serves any purpose of GPU usage (whether i
by shmerl 1y ago
A better question is why there is no stronger push for a nicer GPU language that's not tied to any particular GPU and serves any purpose of GPU usage (whether it's compute or graphics).
I mean efforts like rust-gpu: https://github.com/Rust-GPU/rust-gpu/ https://github.com/Rust-GPU/rust-gpu/
Combine such language with Vulkan (using Rust as well) and why would you need CUDA?
- bee_rider 1y agoI think Intel Fortran has some ability to offload to their GPUs now. And Nvidia has some stuff to run(?) CUDA from Fortran. Probably just needs a couple short decades of refinement…
- pjmlp 1y agoOne of the reasons CUDA won over OpenCL, was that NVidia, contrary to Khronos, saw a value in helping those HPC researchers move their Fortran code into the GPU. Hence they bought PGI, and improved their compiler. Intel eventually did the same with Open API (which isn't plain OpenCL, rather an extension with Intel goodies). I was on a Khronos webminar where the panel showed disbelief why anyone would care about Fortran, oh well.
- kristianp 1y agoIt's insane how big the NVidia dev kit is. They've got a library for everything. It seems like they have as broad software support as possible.
- bee_rider 1y agoThat’s actually pretty surprising to me. Of course, there are always jokes about Fortran being some language that people don’t realize is still kicking. But I’d expect a standards group that is at least parallel computing adjacent to know that it is still around.
- pjmlp 1y agoYet not only they joked about Fortran, it took CUDA adoption success, for them to take C++ seriously and come up with SPIR as counterpoint to PTX. Which in the end was worthless because both Intel and AMD botched all OpenCL 2.x efforts. Hence why OpenCL 3.0 is basically OpenCL 1.0 rebranded, and SYSCL went its own way. It took a commercial company, Codeaplay a former compiler vendor for games consoles, to actually come up with a good tooling for SYSCL. Which Intel in the middle of extending SYSCL with their Data Paralell C++, eventually acquired. Those products are in the foundation of One API, and naturally go beyond what barebones OpenCL happens to be. The mismanagement Khronos has done with OpenCL is one of the reasons Apple lost ties with Khronos.
- JonChesterfield 1y agoI like Julia for this. Pretty language, layered on LLVM like most things. Modular are doing interesting things with Mojo too. People seem to like cuda though.
- shmerl 1y agoCUDA is just DOA as a nice language being Nvidia only (not counting efforts like ZLUDA).
- JonChesterfield 1y agoThat's a compiler problem. Once could start from clang -xcuda and hack onwards. Or work in the intersection of CUDA and HIP which is relatively broad if a bit of a porting nuisance.
- shmerl 1y agoMay be, but who is working on that compiler? And the whole ecosystem is controlled by a nasty company. You don't want to deal with that. Besides, I'd say Rust is a nicer language than CUDA dialects.
- JonChesterfield 1y agoChris and Nick originally, a few more of us these days. Spectral compute. We might have a nicer world if people had backed opencl instead of cuda but whatever. Likewise rust has a serious edge over c++. But to the compiler hacker, this is all obfuscated SSA form anyway, it's hard to get too emotional about the variations.
- shmerl 1y agoLanguage would matter more for those who actually would want to write some programs in it. So I'd say rust-gpu is something that should get more backing.
- 1y ago
- pjmlp 1y agoTooling and ecosystem, that is why.
- shmerl 1y agoRust has great tooling and ecosystem. The point here is more of interest of those who want better alternatives to CUDA. AMD would be an obvious beneficiary to back the above, so I'm surprised about some lack of interest from their likes.
- pjmlp 1y agoIt has zero CUDA tooling, that is what is relevant when positioning itself as alternative to C, C++, Fortran, Python JIT, PTX based compilers, compute libraries, Visual Studio and Eclipse integration, graphical debugger. Cross compiling Rust into PTX is not enough to make researchers leave CUDA.
- shmerl 1y agoAnd CUDA has zero non CUDA tooling. That's a pointless circular argument which doesn't mean anything. Rust has Rust tooling and it's very good. Being language agnostic is also not the task of the language, but task of IR. There is already a bunch of languages, such as Slang. The point is to use Rust itself for it.
- pjmlp 1y agoWhere is the graphical debugging experience for Rust, given that it so great tooling? Slang belongs to NVidia, and was nicely given to Khronos, because almost everyone started relying on HLSL, given that Khronos decided not to spend any additional resources on GLSL. Just like with Mantle and Vulkan, Khronos seems that without external help they aren't able to produce anything meaningful since Long Peak days.
- fnands 1y agoMojo might be what you are looking for: https://docs.modular.com/mojo/manual/gpu/intro-tutorial/ https://docs.modular.com/mojo/manual/gpu/intro-tutorial/ The language is general, but the current focus is really on programming GPUs.