Async/Await on the GPU
7 days ago
- #Rust
- #GPU Programming
- #Async/Await
- VectorWare announces the successful use of Rust's Future trait and async/await on the GPU, marking a significant step towards high-performance GPU-native applications.
- Traditional GPU programming focuses on data parallelism, but warp specialization introduces task-based parallelism, requiring manual concurrency management.
- Projects like JAX, Triton, and CUDA Tile aim to simplify GPU programming with higher-level abstractions but come with adoption barriers and limited code reuse.
- Rust's Future trait and async/await provide structured concurrency in an existing language, allowing composability and fine-grained control without a new ecosystem.
- VectorWare demonstrates async/await on the GPU using a simple block_on executor and adapts the Embassy executor for GPU use, showing concurrent task execution.
- Challenges include cooperative multitasking, lack of GPU interrupts, increased register pressure, and the function coloring problem.
- Future work includes GPU-native executors, leveraging CUDA Graphs, and exploring alternative concurrency models in Rust.
- VectorWare supports multiple programming languages but sees Rust as uniquely suited for high-performance, reliable GPU-native applications.