gpu

Previous blog posts overviewed the MLIR dialect hierarchy for kernel code generation (CodeGen) and zoomed in on the Linalg and Vector dialects among them. Now I will switch to discuss the runtime side a bit, in order to provide a holistic view of MLIR-based machine learning (ML) compilers. This one touches the foundation and basics, including the target landscape, runtime requirements and designs to meet thereof.
This blog post talks about how to generate performant code for convolution ops using MLIR’s multiple levels of abstractions and transformations. I initially created it for targeting ARM Mali GPUs in IREE. But given it is just direct tiling and vectorization, it should be widely applicable. I will walk through the lowering steps, so if you are interested to know how to organize MLIR’s various dialects/patterns together to achieve similar tasks, this blog post might also be useful.
In a previous blog post I gave a general introduction to GPU driver internals in Android/Linux systems. Following up with it, today I will explain how a specific functionality, hardware performance counter (perf counter) queries, is handled in both Qualcomm Adreno and ARM Mali drivers, by walking through the kernel driver source code.
2021-07-08
10 min read
Recently I have been working on a library that needs to directly interact with GPU kernel drivers from various vendors on Android/Linux systems. Compared to various GPU APIs, information at this level is quite sparse; so it is not a straightforward task, to say the least, and ends up requiring me to piece multiple sources together to figure out the details. So I am logging these driver internals and resources down in case it can be useful to others that are interested in these low-level bits.
2021-07-05
12 min read
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Vulkan is designed to be both a graphics and compute API. However, there is no formal definition of the compute subset from the Khronos group, the industry consortium behind Vulkan. The unified specification of Vulkan does not help here either as it contains everything, both graphics and compute. Unlike the complicated graphics subset, the compute subset is actually quite straightforward and clean. So in this blog post I try to explain what Vulkan compute is, from my point of view.
2021-06-25
16 min read
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On 2018 Vulkan Developer Day in Montréal, I gave a talk regarding “Shader Toolchain: HLSL in Vulkan”. Here are the links to the video recording, slides, and documentation/downloads for DirectX Shader Compiler (DXC) SPIR-V CodeGen.
2018-05-12
1 min read
This blog post discusses how HLSL semantic strings are translated into SPIR-V location numbers for Vulkan shader inter-stage interface matching in the SPIR-V CodeGen of DirectXShaderCompiler (DXC). It is one of the “HLSL for Vulkan” series.
2018-05-11
11 min read
This blog post discusses how to manage resources in HLSL for Vulkan, using the SPIR-V CodeGen of DirectXShaderCompiler (DXC). It is one of the “HLSL for Vulkan” series.
2018-04-24
7 min read
This blog post discusses how HLSL matrices are translated into SPIR-V for Vulkan consumption in the SPIR-V CodeGen of DirectXShaderCompiler. It is one of the “HLSL for Vulkan” series.
2018-04-18
13 min read