Alternative(s) to run CUDA on non-Nvidia hardware

(hpcwire.com)

40 points | by alok-g 2 hours ago

8 comments

  • woctordho 47 minutes ago
    There's nothing wrong to run CUDA on non-Nvidia hardware. CUDA has an interface that is reasonably well-designed, well-documented/reverse-engineered, and battle-tested for decades. What we need is not to invent another interface just under the name of 'open standard', but to implement the same interface. ROCm is exactly doing this, and so are other hardware SDKs such as MooreThread and Alibaba T-Head.
  • pjmlp 1 hour ago
    Most of these "alternatives" focus on CUDA C++, and overlook what actually makes CUDA interesting.

    Already in 2020,

    https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/cuda-refresher-the-gpu-com...

    • mschuetz 12 minutes ago
      > Ease of programming and a giant leap in performance is one of the key reasons for the CUDA platform’s widespread adoption

      This, so much. Other platforms continue to ignore developer UX, but it's one of the main things that get's new users onboard and keeps old users around.

    • msond 1 hour ago
      We're actually targeting all of it, and not just CUDA C++.
      • pjmlp 1 hour ago
        Including stuff like Fortran, Haskell, Java, .NET via PTX, Python JIT, IDE tooling integration with major IDEs, graphical GPU debugging and profiling, libraries and co?

        Then I guess all the best.

        • zorked 53 minutes ago
          This post has some serious peanut-gallery vibes.
          • pjmlp 32 minutes ago
            Peanut-gallery is happily using CUDA, and needs actual sound reasons to move.
      • embedding-shape 1 hour ago
        Ambitions but neat, good luck if nothing else :)

        If you were to guess, when do you think your Nsight Compute alternative might be ready with your own toolchain?

        • msond 1 minute ago
          A guess would be some time next year — since our public launch our focus has generally been on API coverage and increasingly recently, on performance.

          While performance improvements will always remain a target, we're soon at full coverage of the core CUDA APIs and will be shifting an increasing amount of effort towards developer tooling.

  • puschkinfr 23 minutes ago
    In this context AdaptiveCpp should also be mentioned. Started as a SYCL implementation, but recently-ish added a compiler for compiling a CUDA dialect to GPUs and CPUs from basically all vendors
  • maxloh 1 hour ago
    There is also ZLUDA, which is open source and works on pre-compiled binaries.

    https://github.com/vosen/ZLUDA

    • tuananh 9 minutes ago
      this is closest thing we have to "cuda on non-nvidia" hardware
  • luciana1u 47 minutes ago
    every CUDA alternative follows the same arc: bold launch, works for 3 operations, then a Discord server where the last message is 'any updates?' from 2024
  • DiabloD3 54 minutes ago
    Its easier to just get rid of your legacy code entirely and use Vulkan for compute, or have your compiler emit SPIR-V directly.

    No reason to tie yourself to Nvidia's moat.

    • mschuetz 9 minutes ago
      A couple of years ago I evaluated both Vulkan and Cuda as a choice for future projects. I couldnt get anything done after a week in Vulkan, but had the test prototype project working after just a day in Cuda.

      Needless to say, I'd never ever pick Vulkan for any project after that experience. It's just way to needlessly overengineered and bloated.

    • swerner 47 minutes ago
      Unfortunately, Vulkan Compute doesn’t to all the things that OpenCL, SYCL, HIP or CUDA do.
      • binsquare 21 minutes ago
        Yep, there are inference stacks where it just does not work without cuda in any meaningful performance
    • dannecodez 48 minutes ago
      [dead]
  • lulzx 53 minutes ago
    I have been trying for cuda -> metal, to run it on mac, https://github.com/lulzx/cuda-metal
  • z0ltan 34 minutes ago
    [dead]