Scientific computing and parallel computing C++23/C++26

[Bruce Carneal]

On Wednesday, 19 January 2022 at 14:24:14 UTC, Paulo Pinto wrote:
> On Wednesday, 19 January 2022 at 13:32:37 UTC, Ola Fosheim 
> Grøstad wrote:
>> On Wednesday, 19 January 2022 at 12:49:11 UTC, Paulo Pinto 
>> wrote:
>>> It also needs to plug into the libraries, IDEs and GPGPU 
>>> debuggers available to the community.
>>
>> But the presentation is not only about HPC, but making 
>> parallel GPU computing as easy as writing regular C++ code and 
>> being able to debug that code on the CPU.
>>
>> I actually think it is sufficient to support Metal and Vulkan 
>> for this to be of value. The question is how much more 
>> performance Nvidia manage to get out of their their nvc++ 
>> compiler for regular GPUs in comparison to a Vulkan solution.
>
> Currently Vulkan Compute is not to be taken seriously.

For those wishing to deploy today, I agree, but it should be 
considered for future deployments.  That said, it's just one way 
for dcompute to tie in. My current dcompute work comes in, for 
example, via PTX-jit courtesy of an Nvidia driver.


>
> Yes, the end goal of the industry efforts is that C++ will be 
> the lingua franca of GPGPUs and FPGAs, that is why SYSCL is 
> collaborating with ISO C++ efforts.

Yes, apparently there's a huge amount of time/money being spent 
on SYCL.  We can co-opt much of that work underneath (the 
upcoming LLVM SPIR-V backend, debuggers, profilers, some libs) 
and provide a much better language on top.  C++/SYCL is, to put 
it charitably, cumbersome.

>
> As for HPC, that is where the money for these kind of efforts 
> comes from.

Perhaps, but I suspect other market segments will be (already 
are?) more important going forward.  Gaming generally and ML on 
SoCs comes to mind.