CFV: Project Trinity

[Karthik Ganesan]

I would like to thank Paul Sandoz, Christian Thalinger, Doug Simon, 
Mario Torre and Volker Simonis for their support and the insightful 
questions.

What we are proposing to do as part of this project is complementary to 
existing efforts that enable offload to GPUs like Sumatra, AparAPI etc. 
These existing projects provide implementations translating existing 
Java API via Bytecodes to GPU language. Trinity extends these efforts 
and takes it one step further by readily providing the building blocks 
for programmers to construct complex bulk data/stream based algorithms 
in Java that can be easily offloaded by these existing projects. While 
having a route to offload to hardware accelerators is useful, but making 
it easier for programmers to leverage will take it one step closer to 
adoption.

Projects like Sumatra and AparAPI use the the Stream ForEach() method to 
show case offloads. Trinity will offer more such methods with richer 
functionality, making it easier for these existing projects to leverage 
and deliver hardware capabilities to be readily consumed by programmers. 
Unlike the existing Streams API, the library for this new API is 
envisioned to have a stronger focus on performance, a dedicated 
implementation that will be offload friendly and cover more functions 
that are relevant to this domain of programmers.

Also, please note that Trinity casts a wider a net when it comes to 
accelerators, not just GPUs/APUs. These accelerators can include 
Analytics accelerators like DAX, SIMD units on general purpose cores, 
FPGA based accelerators for bulk aggregate operations, GPUs and whatever 
more the future holds in terms of heterogeneous computing for bulk data 
processing.

Inspired by the existing Streams API that brings succinct functional 
programming to Java using lambdas, this project will try to retain such 
rich features, significantly simplifying programming in Java for the 
performance oriented developers focusing on bulk data processing.

Regards,

Karthik


On 4/24/2017 4:09 AM, Doug Simon wrote:
>> On 24 Apr 2017, at 10:50, Volker Simonis <volker.simonis at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> On Sun, Apr 23, 2017 at 1:39 PM, Doug Simon <doug.simon at oracle.com> wrote:
>>>> On 21 Apr 2017, at 23:54, Christian Thalinger <cthalinger at twitter.com> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>> On Apr 21, 2017, at 11:41 AM, Karthik Ganesan <karthik.ganesan at oracle.com> wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>> Hi Christian,
>>>>>
>>>>> Thanks for your interest. This question was brought up previously in the discussion email thread for this project:
>>>>>
>>>>> Project Sumatra was aimed at translation of Java byte code to execute on
>>>>> GPU, which was an ambitious goal and a challenging task to take up. In this
>>>>> project, we aim to come up with APIs targeting the most common Analytics
>>>>> operations that can be readily offloaded to accelerators transparently. Most
>>>>> of the information needed for offload to the accelerator is expected to be
>>>>> readily provided by the API semantics and there by, simplifying the need to
>>>>> do tedious byte code analysis.
>>>> I disagree.  The first paragraph on the Sumatra project page says:
>>>>
>>>> "This primary goal of this project is to enable Java applications to take advantage of graphics processing units (GPUs) and accelerated processing units (APUs)--whether they are discrete devices or integrated with a CPU--to improve performance.”
>>>>
>>>> while you state:
>>>>
>>>> "This Project would explore enhanced execution of bulk
>>>> aggregate calculations over Streams through offloading
>>>> calculations to hardware accelerators.”
>>>>
>>>> It’s the same thing.  I just don’t see the need to spin up yet-another OpenJDK project that aims at the same goal.
>>> Maybe this is just a discrepancy between the officially stated aims. I understood Sumatra to be about *automatic* offloading work for existing APIs (such as the Streams API) to a GPU where as Trinity seems to be more about designing an explicit API for GPU offloading.
>>>
>> So if this is about a explicit API for GPU offloading, will this be a
>> Java implementation/wrapper for already existing C/C++ APIs like
>> CUDA/OpenCL. Designing a completely new, Java-specific API seems to be
>> not very promising to me.
> I agree.
>
> Karthik, maybe you could discuss the differences/similarities between Trinity and the Arapapi project (https://github.com/aparapi/aparapi).
>
> -Doug