Modern GPU

http://nvlabs.github.io/moderngpu/

by ot • 13 years ago

190 28 13 years ago

nvlabs.github.io

compilercreator• 13 years ago

Is it CUDA only or can we submit code written in OpenCL, DirectCompute or C++ AMP etc?

sliverstorm• 13 years ago

It looks like NVIDIA is hoping to highlight CUDA here. You can always try though.

seanmcdirmid• 13 years ago

To be honest, for the target audience of this book, CUDA is the only thing that matters right now. OpenCL and DirectCompute will possibly be significant in the future if AMD and Intel can catch up with NVIDIA in GPGPU performance.

gjm11• 13 years ago

The title here, although it matches that of the linked page, conveys little information to anyone who doesn't already know what it's about.

("Modern GPU is code and commentary intended to promote new and productive ways of thinking about GPU computing. This project is a library, an algorithms book, a tutorial, and a best-practices guide.")

Perhaps something like "Modern GPU: NVIDIA's guide to making effective use of CUDA"?

bluehex• 13 years ago

Totally agree. However every single time I've tried to editorialize a title like this one to make it better the mods have changed it back to the page's title. I imagine a lot of people have given up on even trying to make informative titles. It's the worst part about this forum in my opinion.

flatline• 13 years ago

And the suggestion to make a blog post about it, then submit that, is really just encouraging blog spam, which typically gets flagged into oblivion. I know that I will do so - a one or two sentence blog post should not IMO be submitted in lieu of the article itself. I personally thought the ability to editorialize with only flamebait titles being changed by the mods was way better. Yes, it led to arbitrary decisions by the mods, but I see two problems with the current system:

- Information is often missing from the original, as it is here

- The mods are not always so quick to rename, and it's frustrating to see an article that I previously read changed to another title, resulting in confusion when I see it.

Further, The current system actually incentivizes over-editorializing the title to get a post boosted onto the front page, knowing it will be causally re-titled by the mods in due course.

ot• 13 years ago

I absolutely agree, but I stopped editorializing titles because they were either reverted to the original title, o re-editorialized by the moderators.

I can't change the title anymore, hope some moderator will.

mjhoy• 13 years ago

The title at r/programming, by contrast, is

> New GPU computing ebook and library. Design methodologies, algorithms, tuning, the works.

rdtsc2• 13 years ago

So how do I use this with the new and modern Radeon HD7990 card?

Hmm looks like there is no CUDA library for it...

(flagging post for misleading title)

eelsen• 13 years ago

This is clearly an amazing resource on advanced GPU programming regardless of programming language.

amouat• 13 years ago

To the best of my knowledge, CUDA is Nvidia only. You would need to look at OpenCL or something similar. I guess the techniques presented in the article could be ported to OpenCL.

alexchamberlain• 13 years ago

I think that's the point... The title conveys a more general article.

skyebook• 13 years ago

Right, CUDA is Nvidia only (8-series and above, so basically anything after 2006). The stuff in the article can totally be replicated in OpenCL. Especially since OpenCL 1.1 where buffers can be shared between GL and CL contexts, which IIRC was the only real technical capability CUDA had that OpenCL did not.

jacquesm• 13 years ago

What do you suggest, he writes a new title it will get flagged because it does not have the original title (or it gets reverted).

Suggest you undo your flag or write a better article with a better title.

rdtsc2• 13 years ago

OK undone my flag.

However, it was flagged originally because it promotes bad way forward for the community who want to learn GPU computing. It is pushes material for one company NVIDIA and its products and SDK, while there is an alternative open standard.

Instead of embracing it they continue splitting the community and do it an deceiving way "Modern GPU"? I gave an example of a modern GPU that this doesn't apply.

> a better article with a better title.

That is a bit dis-ingenious. Every time someone is wrong on the internet I will not go and spend hours re-writing their stuff but better. I thought a vote of flag was supposed to achieve some of that. Yes, it is a lot better to contribute and improve but I pick my battles, and filtering out bad stuff is another way of contributing.

vilya• 13 years ago

This is one way to run CUDA on your Radeon card: https://code.google.com/p/gpuocelot/

Although there's a note on that page saying that they're actively seeking developers for the AMD back-end, so I don't know how solid the support is.

quackerhacker• 13 years ago

Guide looks very well written, and I'm actually studying parallel programming right now...bookmarked.

Side Note: Maybe this is Nvidia's way to promote sales, since AMD cards sold like crazy cause of the mining craze.

jjoonathan2• 13 years ago

It's not reactionary: nvidia invested heavily in getting to market first and advertising to the HPC crowd and they have been reaping the rewards of a monopoly for a few years now. Their latest high-end cards are dramatically more expensive (vs AMD at the same raw computational power) while offering completely crippled GPGPU capabilities. I recall incredulity on IRC when people found that their new 6xx cards were a step backwards from the corresponding 5xx cards for their GPGPU apps. Pro media & HPC users fork over the cash for Tesla because they can't jump to AMD due to their legacy CUDA code. Gamers don't care since they don't use double precision arithmetic.

The bitcoin community was the only one nimble enough to switch to AMD. For those of us in academia, we'll be paying the piper for the foreseeable future :/

hendzen• 13 years ago

Bitcoin miners flocked to AMD because the SHA-256 algorithm utilizes a 32-bit right rotate operation that AMD cards could execute in one clock cycle, while NVidia cards took ~3 cycles to do so.

At this point it doesn't really matter since GPU mining is obsolete.

Also, what's wrong with NVidia's GPGPU capabilities? The last time I had to write GPU code, I found that CUDA was much more mature - and much more pleasant to write than the equivalent OpenCL. Also, the benefits of being able to run OpenCL code on multiple compute platforms were being realized by CUDA with the development of a PTX to x86 compiler.

profquail• 13 years ago

Previous HN discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3004446

The url linked there redirects to the new site, but the old site is still available through the Wayback Machine:

http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.moderngpu.com/

yan• 13 years ago

For those interested in articles like these, there's a really great course on iTunes U (and YouTube, among other places) from UC Davis titled "Graphics Architecture", taught by John Owens. [1]

I clicked on it being tangentially interested in GPUs and ended up watching all the lectures within the next few days with rapt attention. The topic ended up being far more interesting than I thought and was delivered in a very approachable way.

[1] https://itunes.apple.com/us/itunes-u/graphics-architecture-w...

DocSavage• 13 years ago

There's also a GPU programming course being taught at Udacity:

https://www.udacity.com/course/cs344

seanbaxter• 13 years ago

It's my site. I didn't realize it was even posted here (I did post it at reddit).

To address some points:

The title of the site is kind of vague, agreed. I'm going to write an abstract for the index page to describe the gist of the design methodologies.

It's not part of an NVIDIA sales pitch, at all. I work in NVIDIA Research and have a lot of autonomy. I like doing programming patterns and algorithms research. At some point I had amassed a lot of stuff and thought it would be nice to share everything with the community.. no coordination with the marketing folks. My employer was nice enough to let me release it, but this is my project, not an official company one. This flexibility is one advantage of working in research.

I don't want to get dragged into a vendor or API debate. The MGPU project is about programming concepts. It wouldn't be hard for a developer to translate all the functions into another API--"hackability" is a goal that I talk about in the introduction. I chose CUDA because it's succinct (important for code readability) and its what I use on a daily basis.

baggers• 13 years ago

Cheers for the great work, I'm really looking forward to working through this.

Modern GPU

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