Project Trinity

[LaMothe, Ryan R]

I think it would be worthwhile to reach out to the Aparapi, Sumatra, etc. folks to find out what hurdles they encountered trying to implement the same capabilities you are proposing, and why those efforts either slowed, stalled or stopped altogether. It turns out, the devil is truly in the details when you finally start down this road, and many of us (myself included), would be more than willing to knowledge share with you to help you out. In my personal opinion, what you are proposing does not need a new project but a revival of existing efforts (i.e. Sumatra), as others have pointed out.

As for Sumatra, the actual goal was to convert Java code to HSAIL, so a reviving of that effort to additionally output CUDA, VHDL, DAX, et.al. as appropriate would be welcome by many of us. If you could additionally convince the powers-that-be to support contiguous multi-dimensional arrays ([[ ]]) as part of your effort...you may even make new best friends :)


-Ryan

On 4/24/17, 8:00 AM, "discuss on behalf of Karthik Ganesan" <discuss-bounces at openjdk.java.net on behalf of karthik.ganesan at oracle.com> wrote:

    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