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by 6d65 1673 days ago
Another great post in the series.

I've been trying to bootstrap my own deep learning framework in Rust for a while now. I'm still stuck at implementing the stuff on the CPU.

But I've always wanted something running on GPU as well. I've poked at OpenCL, and webgpu. But Piet-gpu(more probably piet-hal) seems to be the best starting point in the Rust land.

Once I get to the GPU compute part, I'll start with Piet GPU. Not looking forward to debugging GPU compute kernels, but maybe it will be fun.

PS. It's a bit disheartening to see such buggy Vulkan implementations, since one of the main Vulkan selling points was less bugs in the drivers. I'm not sure what I'll see on Linux.

Also, I hoped that between Vulkan and Metal one could cover all the the major desktop OSes with GPU accelerated software. It's sad to see apple dropping the ball in this regard.

There is also the concern of code reuse and code quality. Doing something complex in one pass would mean a huge kernel. It would be interesting to investigate if something like openai's Triton can be implemented in top of Piet-gpu(HAL). A dsl embedded in Rust that could do kernel fusion, and generate one shader when composed together. I'll poke around at this when I get to Piet-gpu.

1 comments

Let's talk if and when you want to build something. I make no promises that piet-gpu-hal is suitable for other workloads (right now I would say it barely meets the needs for piet-gpu), but on the other hand I am interested in the question of what it lacks and what it would take to run, eg, machine learning workloads on top of it.