Rust SIMD on the GPU

efnx

Congrats to the Rust-GPU folks! Nice to see the good work flowing.

LegNeato

Author here, AMA.

6r17

My heard hurts - i was stupid enough to think that SIMD was a CPU only thing - I don't understand why it would be ported to GPU - huge kudos to managing to surprise me

the__alchemist

Hey - this is probably off-topic/meta, but what is going on with the comments here? Is it bots?

O3marchnative

The author mentions Rust's portable SIMD library [0]. The only issue with portable SIMD is it's only available on nightly. I used it in my FFT crate, but we had to switch to the fearless_simd crate in order to get a portable SIMD solution that works on stable [1]. [0] https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/simd/index.html [1] https://github.com/linebender/fearless_simd

nynx

Do you have examples of complex algorithms running on the gpu with rust with competative performance? Radix sort might be a good one to start with

camel-cdr

I love how ever example of portable SIMD isn't portable. They specifies a constant SIMD width so it's non-portable. Well, not performance portable, but why are we using SIMD again?

nperez19

Love the pendantic mode setting on the website

grokcodec

I would love to have an open source Rust SIMD library with the scope and maturity that https://github.com/google/highway brings to C++.

dev_dan_2

Really exciting work and great write up, thanks a lot and all the best to your startup! `core` instead of `std` is great too! This will become useful in one of my sideproject where I use bitmaps to speed up pathfinding, exited to try it out!

melodyogonna

Very interesting. But GPU programming gets complicated when you start doing 3d computation on very large data, will be interesting to see how tensor abstraction is built on top of this. Another point is that this is using fixed-width SIMD vectors; unless there is a way to compute this statically based on available GPU info, performance will always be left on the table.

frollogaston

I've noticed a lot of articles about SIMD on the HN front page. That's cool, but just wondering, is there some reason this is more in focus lately?