[squeak-dev] GPGPU

Christopher Hogan flipityskipit at hotmail.com
Thu Oct 29 11:40:04 UTC 2009


hmm,   could you just plop the vm on top of Barrelfish and let it do all the fancy multi-processor stuff for you?

http://www.linux-magazine.com/Online/News/Barrelfish-Multikernel-Operating-System-out-of-Zurich

http://www.barrelfish.org/



Chris Hogan




> Date: Wed, 28 Oct 2009 18:23:20 -0200
> From: casimiro.barreto at gmail.com
> To: squeak-dev at lists.squeakfoundation.org
> Subject: Re: [squeak-dev] GPGPU
> 
> Em 28-10-2009 15:24, Josh Gargus escreveu:
> > I agree with Casmiro's response... GPUs aren't suitable for running
> > Smalltalk code.  Larrabee might be interesting, since it will have 16
> > or more x86 processors, but it's difficult to see how to utilize the
> > powerful vector processor attached to each x86.
> Here I see two opportunities. The first would be to follow the advice of
> mr. Ingalls and start to develop a generic VM and related classes to
> deal with parallel processing (something I think is extremely delayed
> since multicore processors are around for such a long time) and IMHO,
> not dealing with SMP processing prevents dealing with NUMA processing
> where the advantages of smalltalk should be astounding.
> 
> The second is to provide squeak with solid intrinsic vector processing
> capabilities which would reopen the field of high performance
> applications in science and engineering and also for more mundane
> applications like game industry.
> >
> > Your question was more specifically about running something like Slang
> > on it.  It's important to remember that Slang isn't Smalltalk, it's C
> > with Smalltalk syntax (i.e. all Slang language constructs are
> > implemented by a simple 1-1 mapping onto the corresponding C language
> > feature).  So yes, it would be possible to run something like Slang on
> > a GPU.  Presumably, you would want to take the integration one step
> > farther than with Slang, and automatically compile the generated
> > OpenCL or CUDA code instead of dumping it to an external file.
> >
> > Instead of thinking of running Smalltalk on the GPU, I would think
> > about writing a DSL (domain-specific language) for a particular class
> > of problems that can be solved well on the GPU.  Then I would think
> > about how to integrate this DSL nicely into Smalltalk.
> 
> That's sort of my idea :)
> 
> I'm not considering CUDA at the moment because it would be more specific
> to NVIDIA architecture. Currently the GPU market is shared mostly
> between NVIDA and AMD/ATI and AMD says they won't support CUDA on their
> GPUs (just follow
> http://www.amdzone.com/index.php/news/video-cards/11775-no-cuda-on-radeon as
> an example). It's a pitty since last year it was reported that RADEON
> compatibility in CUDA was almost complete. Besides there are licensing
> issues and I just don't want to have "wrappers".
> 
> It's obvious that I know many of the problems dealt by CUDA and OpenCL:
> the variable number and size of pipelines, problems with numeric
> representation and FP precision, etc... etc... etc... And I know it
> would be much easier just to write some wrappers or, easier yet, to
> develop things in C/C++ & glue them with FFI. But then, what would be
> the gain to squeak & the smalltalk community?
> >
> > Sean McDermid has done something like this with C#, LINQ, HLSL, and
> > Direct3D (http://bling.codeplex.com/).  He's not doing GPGPU per se,
> > but the point is how seamless is his integration with C#.
> >
> > Cheers,
> > Josh
> >
> Best regards,
> 
> CdAB
> 
 		 	   		  
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