CFV: Project Trinity

[Doug Simon]

> 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.

-Doug