Nvidia CUDA Software Gets Ported to Open-Source RISC-V GPGPU Project

IT要改成Internal Turn(内卷)的缩写了。:-)

Nvidia CUDA Software Gets Ported to Open-Source RISC-V GPGPU Project | Tom's Hardware (tomshardware.com)

RISC-V has been one of the hottest topics in the world of computing, as the Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) allows for extensive customization and is easy to understand, besides the whole open-source, license-free benefit. There's even a project that designed a general-purpose GPU based on RISC-V ISA, and now we are witnessing a port of Nvidia's CUDA software library to the Vortex RISC-V GPGPU platform.

Nvidia's CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture) represents a unique computing platform and application programming interface (API) that runs on Nvidia's lineup of graphics cards. When applications are coded for CUDA support, whenever a system spots a CUDA-based GPU, it gets massive GPU acceleration of the code.

Today, researchers have examined a way to enable CUDA software toolkit support on a RISC-V GPGPU project called Vortex. The Vortex RISC-V GPGPU aims to provide a full-system RISC-V GPU based on RV32IMF ISA. That means 32-bit cores that can be scaled from 1-core to 32-core GPU designs. It supports OpenCL 1.2 graphics API, and today it got support for some CUDA action as well.

The researchers explain: "...in this project we propose and build a pipeline to support an end-to-end CUDA migration: the pipeline accepts CUDA source codes as input and executes them on an extended RISC-V GPU architecture. Our pipeline consists of several steps: translates CUDA source code into NVVM IR, convert NVVM IR into SPIR-V IR, forwards SPIR-V IR into POCL to get RISC-V binary file, and finally executes the binary file on an extended RISC-V GPU architecture."

This process is visualized in the graph above, showing all the steps to get it working. In simple terms, CUDA source code is represented in the intermediate representation (IR) format called NVVM IR, based on the open-source LLVM IR. It is later converted to Standard Portable Intermediate Representation (SPIR-V) IR, then forwards that into the portable open-source implementation of the OpenCL standard called POCL. As Vortex supports OpenCL, it is fed with supported code and executes it without a problem.

For more details on this complicated process, check out this paper. And as an important note, you have to appreciate the effort of these researchers to enable CUDA to run on a RISC-V GPGPU. While this is only a small step for now, it is a possible beginning of an era where RISC-V is used for accelerated computing applications, very similar to what Nvidia is doing today with its GPU lineup.

作者中亚洲人占80%……

HIPIFY is a tool to translate CUDA source code into portable HIP C++, another high-level language proposed for AMD devices. HIPIFY is a translator from a high-level language to another high-level language, as most of its workload is done at the lexical level. To support executing CUDA on AMD devices, users need to first use HIPIFY to convert CUDA into HIP C++ and then compile the generated code with the HIP C++ compiler.

NVVM IR, proposed by NVIDIA, is a compiler IR used to represent GPU compute kernels. In the general case, to execute CUDA source code on NVIDIA GPUs, we need to call nvcc to compile CUDA into NVVM IR, and the GPU driver will further translate the NVVM IR into a binary code that can be run on the processing cores of NVIDIA GPUs. NVVM IR is highly compatible with LLVM[11]; it supports a subset of LLVM IR along with a defined set of the build-in functions used to represent GPU programming concepts.

SPIR-V is the fifth version of SPIR. SPIR (Standard Portable Intermediate Representation) is an intermediate representation (IR) used for expressing parallel computation and GPU-based graphics.

OpenCL (Open Computing Language) is a framework for writing programs that execute across heterogeneous platforms. It supports several back-end devices: CPUs, GPUs, FPGAs, and so on.

The Georgia Institute of Technology, commonly referred to as Georgia Tech or, in the state of Georgia, as Tech, is a public research university and institute of technology in Atlanta, Georgia. Georgia: 1. a state in the southeast US, 佐治亚; 2. a country in the extreme southeast of Europe, east of the Black Sea, 格鲁吉亚

六级/考研单词: hardware, compute, instruct, besides, unify, accelerate, migrate, execute, translate, convert, graph, intermediate, implement, complicate, era, hip, compile, farther, compatible, parallel