you have to be able to pip install something and just have it work, reasonably fast, without crashing, and also it has to not interfere with 100 other weird poorly maintained ML library dependencies.
In the case of these abstraction layers, then it would be the responsibility of the abstraction maintainers (or AMD) to port them. Obviously, someone who does not even use CUDA would not use HIP either.
To be honest, I have a hard time believing that a truly zero-effort solution exists. Especially one that gets high performance. Once you start talking about the full stack, there are too many potholes and sharp edges to believe that it will really work. So I am highly skeptical of original article. Not that I wouldn't want to be proved wrong. But what they're claiming to do is a big lift, even taking HIP as a starting point.
The easiest, fastest (for end users), highest-performance solution for ML will come when the ecosystem integrates it natively. HIP would be a way to get there faster, but it will take nonzero effort from CUDA-proficient engineers to get there.
As other commenters have pointed out, this is probably a good solution for HPC jobs where everyone is using C++ or Fortran anyway and you frequently write your own CUDA kernels.
From time to time I run into a decision maker who understandably wants to believe that AMD cards are now "ready" to be used for deep learning, and points to things like the fact that HIP mostly works pretty well. I was kind of reacting against that.
Of course becoming "really good" is a lot different and like anything else, it presumably takes a lot of callused fingertips (from typing) to get there.
What's your opinion on the future of writing optimized GPU code/kernels - how long before compilers are as good or better than (most) humans writing hand-optimized PTX?
You'll also note that M1/2 macs with large amounts of system memory are good at inference because of the fact that the gpu has a very high speed interconnect between the soldiered on ram modules and the on die gpu. It's all about avoiding bottlenecks whereever possible.
So yeah it’s not ideal if you’re on a budget, but it seems like there are some solutions that don’t involve massive capex.
A new 4090 costs around $1800 (https://www.centralcomputer.com/asus-tuf-rtx4090-o24g-gaming...) and that's probably affordable to AWS users. I see a 2080Ti on Craigslist for $300 (https://sfbay.craigslist.org/scz/sop/d/aptos-nvidia-geforce-...) though used GPU's are possibly thrashed by bitcoin mining. I don't have a suitable host machine, unfortunately.
When people were mining Ethereum (which was the last craze that GPUs were capable of playing in -- BTC has been off the GPU radar for a long time), profitable mining was fairly kind to cards compared to gaming.
Folks wanted their hardware to produce as much as possible, for as little as possible, before it became outdated.
The load was constant, so heat cycles weren't really a thing.
That heat was minimized; cards were clocked (and voltages tweaked) to optimize the ratio of crypto output to Watts input. For Ethereum, this meant undervolting and underclocking the GPU -- which are kind to it.
Fan speeds were kept both moderate and tightly controlled; too fast, and it would cost more (the fans themselves cost money to run, and money to replace). Too slow, and potential output was left on the table.
For Ethereum, RAM got hit hard. But RAM doesn't necessarily care about that; DRAM in general is more or less just an array of solid-state capacitors. And people needed that RAM to work reliably -- it's NFG to spend money producing bad blocks.
Power supplies tended to be stable, because good, cheap, stable, high-current, and stupidly-efficient are qualities that go hand-in-hand thanks to HP server PSUs being cheap like chips.
There were exceptions, of course: Some people did not mine smartly.
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But this is broadly very different from how gamers treat hardware, wherein: Heat cycles are real, over clocking everything to eek out an extra few FPS is real, pushing things a bit too far and producing glitches can be tolerated sometimes, fan speeds are whatever, and power supplies are picked based on what they look like instead of an actual price/performance comparison.
A card that was used for mining is not implicitly worse in any way than one that was used for gaming. Purchasing either thing involves non-zero risk.
> Fan speeds were kept both moderate and tightly controlled; too fast, and it would cost more (the fans themselves cost money to run, and money to replace). Too slow, and potential output was left on the table.
In the ideal case, this is spot on. Annoyingly however, this hinges on the assumption of an awful lot of competence from top to bottom.
If I've learned anything in my considerable career, it's that reality is typically one of the first things tossed when situations and goals become complex.
The few successful crypto miners maybe did some of the optimizations you mention. The odds aren't good enough for me to want to purchase a Craigslist or FB marketplace card for only a 30% discount.
I do genuinely admire your idealism, though.
A used card is it sale. It was previously used for mining, or it was previously used for gaming.
We can't tell, and caveat emptor.
Which one is worse? Neither.
Gaming cards/rigs, which many of the early miners were based on, rarely run at 100% all the time, the workload is burst-y (and distributed amongst different areas of the system). In comparison, a miner runs at 100% all the time.
On top of that, for silicon there is an effect called electromigration [1], where the literal movement of electrons erodes the material over time - made worse by ever shrinking feature sizes as well as, again, the chips being used in exactly the same way all the time.
Optimizing something for SIMD execution isn't often straightforward and it isn't something a lot of developers encounter outside a few small areas. There are also a lot of hardware architecture considerations you have to work with (memory transfer speed is a big one) to even come close to saturating the compute units.
5320814 / 180 / 16 = ~1847.5
Per https://www.apmex.com/gold-price and https://goldprice.org/, current value is north of $2400 / oz. It was around $1800 in 2020. That growth for _gold_ of all things (up 71% in the last 5 years) is crazy to me.
It's worth noting that anyone with a ski house that expensive probably has a net worth well over twice the price of that ski house. I guess it's time to start learning CUDA!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troy_weight
180 avoirdupois pounds is 2,625 ounces troy. The gold price is around $2470/ounce troy today, so $2470*2625 ~= $6.483 million
For comparison: S&P500 grew about the same during that period (more than 100% from Jan 2019, about 70 from Dec 2019), so the higher price of gold did not outperform the growth of the general (financial) economy.
Anyway, there isn't a lot of evidence that the value of gold is going up. It seems to just be keeping pace with the M2. Both doubled-and-a-bit since 2010 (working in USD).
Nvidia literally wrote most of the textbooks in this field and you’d probably be taught using one of these anyway:
https://developer.nvidia.com/cuda-books-archive
“GPGPU Gems” is another “cookbook” sort of textbook that might be helpful starting out but you’ll want a good understanding of the SIMT model etc.
GP says it is just some #ifdefs in most cases, so an LLM should be able to do it, right?
This seems to be fairly common problem with software. The people who create software regularly deal with complex tool chains, dependency management, configuration files, and so on. As a result they think that if a solutions "exists" everything is fine. Need to edit a config file for your particular setup? No problem. The thing is, I have been programming stuff for decades and I really hate having to do that stuff and will avoid tools that make me do it. I have my own problems to solve, and don't want to deal with figuring out tools no matter how "simple" the author thinks that is to do.
A huge part of the reason commercial software exists today is probably because open source projects don't take things to this extreme. I look at some things that qualify as products and think they're really simplistic, but they take care of some minutia that regular people are will to pay so they don't have to learn or deal with it. The same can be true for developers and ML researchers or whatever.
I don't think so. I agree it is too hard for the ML researches at the companies which will have their rear ends handed to them by the other companies whose ML researchers can be bothered to follow a blog post and prompt ChatGPT to resolve error messages.
and rightly so, they have more complicated issues to tackle
It's on developers to provide better infrastructure and solve these challenges
I'm also speaking from personal experience: I once had to hand-write my own CUDA kernels (on official NVIDIA cards, not even this weird translation layer): it was useful and I figured it out, but everything was constantly breaking at first.
It was a drag on productivity and more importantly, it made it too difficult for other people to run my code (which means they are less likely to cite my work).
(and for one data point, I believe Blender is actively using HIP for AMD GPU support in Cycles.)