Hacker News Reader

Comment by p1esk | Hacker News Reader

Sounds great! I just looked at https://github.com/tensorflow/swift - where can I find a convolution operation written in Swift?

View on HN

You can't. It won't be available for at least a year I'm guessing.

Even then I'm not sure what granularity MLIR will allow.

On the other hand you can do it in Julia today. There is a high-level kernel compiler and array abstractions but you could also write lower level code in pure Julia as well. Check out the Julia GPU GitHub org

If it's not ready I don't see much sense in discussing it. Google betting on it does not inspire much confidence either. Google managed to screw up Tensorflow so bad no one I know uses it anymore. So if this Swift project is going to be tied to TF in any way it's not a good sign.

As for Julia, I like it. Other than the fact that it counts from 1 (that is just wrong!). However, I'm not sure it's got what it'd take to become a Python killer. I feel like it needs a big push to become successful in a long run. For example, if Nvidia and/or AMD decide to adopt it as the official language for GPU programming. Something crazy like that.

Personally, I'm interested in GPU accelerated Numpy with autodiff built in. Because I find pure Numpy incredibly sexy. So basically something like ChainerX or Jax. Chainer is dead, so that leaves Jax as the main Pytorch challenger.

I was looking around for a language to write my own versions of convolution layers or LTSM or various other ideas I have. I thought I would have to learn c++ and CUDA, which from what I hear would take a lot of time. Is this difficult in Julia If I would go through some courses and learn the basics of Julia?

This would really give me some incentive to learn the language.

You could just use LoopVectorization on the CPU side. It's been shown to match well-tuned C++ BLAS implementations, for example with the pure Julia Gaius.jl (https://github.com/MasonProtter/Gaius.jl), so you can follow that as an example for getting BLAS-speed CPU side kernels. For the GPU side, there's CUDAnative.jl and KernelAbstractions.jl, and indeed benchmarks from NVIDIA show that it at least rivals directly writing CUDA (https://devblogs.nvidia.com/gpu-computing-julia-programming-...), so you won't be missing anything just by learning Julia and sticking to using just Julia for researching new kernel implementations.

In that benchmark, was Julia tested against CuDNN accelerated neural network CUDA code? If not, is it possible (and beneficial) to call CuDNN functions from Julia?

That wasn't a benchmark with CuDNN since it was a benchmark about writing such kernels. However, Julia libraries call into optimized kernels whenever they exist, and things like NNLib.jl (the backbone of Flux.jl) and KNet.jl expose operations like `conv` that dispatch CuArrays to automatically use CuDNN.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com