Rust threads on the GPU

23 points by wofo

Arch

Hopefully somebody can educate me: how does this compare with RustGPU?

john_austin
Somebody correct me if I am wrong, but from what I can tell:
- RustGPU: Compiles a single-threaded Rust function to run as a shader on the GPU. It's like replacing HLSL or GLSL with Rust instead. The exact invocation of this shader isn't part of the project.
- Vectorware: Modifies the Rust compiler to execute a larger program including multi-threaded logic entirely on the GPU.
Vectorware is a bigger project, closer to some of the high performance computing frameworks like OpenMP or MPI, but with less fragility (I think).

It's a cool proof of concept. I'd like to see it extended to support things like Work Graphs, which I think is where computation on the GPU gets very interesting. Also, this currently works by having all threads known at compile time, and having them wait to activate, but I'd like to see something that spawns new GPU workloads dynamically! I'm actually a bit curious why they don't do that with a little event loop on the CPU or something.. maybe that starts to get a bit complex.