Re: GPU programming?

Not surprising since most academic HPCs and HPC-enabled clouds (Oracle,
Azure) are generally running some version of RHEL. The former is where the
largest GPU resources are available to most folks (e.g., TACC), as I am
sure you already know. OTOH, someone doing with FreeBSD is likely just
wanting it for a workstation or some single node, many-core server they
picked up cheap off of eBay or an e-cycler; (basically me, but I focus on
OpenMP and standard CPU SMP). If you're doing AI related things, then a lot
of sites are starting to spring up that sell GPU heavy single box builds,
but those are also assuming some kind of Linux.

Brett

On Mon, Feb 5, 2024 at 11:10 AM Steve Kargl <
sgk@troutmask.apl.washington.edu> wrote:

> On Mon, Feb 05, 2024 at 12:17:57PM +0100, Jan Beich wrote:
> > Alexander Leidinger <Alexander@Leidinger.net> writes:
> >
> > > ROCm: No idea. I have not seen any report about it working or even
> > > being tried. But there was at least some discussion about it:
> > >     https://github.com/ROCm/ROCm/issues/138
> > >     https://github.com/ROCm/ROCm/issues/1913
> >
> > AFAIU (never owned an AMD GPU):
> > - ROCm requires amdkfd.ko which drm-kmod doesn't provide since
> >   https://github.com/freebsd/drm-kmod/commit/a381f46adf8b
> > - ROCm has poor *consumer* GPU support thus unattractive for
> >   volunteers/community to spend time porting
> >
> > > Intel: Maybe. We have spirv ports in the tree, and my limited
> > > understanding is, that SPIR-V comes into play when someone wants to do
> > > GPU compute there. CCing Jan as the port maintainer for the two spirv
> > > ports. Maybe he can shed some light on this part.
> >
> > - Vulkan Compute works fine on every modern GPU (used at least by ncnn)
> > - OpenCL works fine on Intel + AMD via Rusticl (Mesa), see
> >   https://cgit.freebsd.org/ports/commit/?id=d8990eff958b
> > - OpenCL + oneAPI Level Zero via lang/intel-compute-runtime requires
> userptr, see
> >   https://github.com/FreeBSDDesktop/kms-drm/issues/197
> >
> > As a volunteer I've burned out porting Intel stuff, so hopefully Rusticl
> > kills Intel NEO (intel-compute-runtime) while Vulkan Video kills VA-API
> > (libva-intel-media-driver) and QuickSyncVideo (intel-media-sdk + onevpl)
> >
> > Related https://www.phoronix.com/news/David-Airlie-oneAPI-Meetup
>
> Alexander, Jan,
>
> Thanks for the info.  I'll check out the various links.
> This somewhat confirms my suspicion that little is being
> done with scientific numerical GPU computing in the FreeBSD.
>
> --
> Steve
>
>