clspv VS Cgml

See https://github.com/google/clspv for an OpenCL implementation on Vulkan Compute. There are plenty of quirks involved because the two standards use different varieties of SPIR-V ("kernels" vs. "shaders") and provide different guarantees (Vulkan Compute doesn't care much about numerical accuracy). The Mesa folks are also looking into this as part of their RustiCL (a modern OpenCL implementation) and Zink (implementing OpenGL and perhaps OpenCL itself on Vulkan) projects.

Vulkan Compute backends for numerical compute (as typified by both OpenCL and SYCL) are challenging, you can look at Google's cspv https://github.com/google/clspv project for the nitty gritty details. The lowest-effort path is actually via some combination of Rocm (for hardware that AMD bothers to support themselves) and the Mesa project's Rusticl backend (for everything else).

D3D12 has more compute features than Vulkan has. It works out for DXVK because games often don’t use those, but it’ll cause much more issues with CLon12.

By the way, if you are ready to have a _limited_ implementation without a full feature set because of Vulkan API limitations, clvk is a thing. The list of limitations of that approach is at https://github.com/google/clspv/blob/master/docs/OpenCLCOnVu...

tldr: Vulkan and OpenCL SPIR-V dialects are different, and the former has significant limitations affecting this use case

For OpenCL on DX12, the test suite doesn't pass yet. Every Khronos OpenCL 1.2 CTS test passes on at least one hardware driver, but there's none that pass them all. That is why CLon12 isn't submitted to Khronos's compliant products list yet.

The pointer semantics that Vulkan has aren't very amenable to implementing a compliant OpenCL implementation on top of. There are also some other limitatons: https://github.com/google/clspv/blob/master/docs/OpenCLCOnVu....

Vulkan is much more limited, notably because of Vulkan's SPIR-V dialect limitations. That makes a compliant OpenCL 1.2 impl on top of Vulkan impossible. (see: https://github.com/google/clspv/blob/master/docs/OpenCLCOnVulkan.md)

OpenCL really is your best bet for a cross-platform GPU-capable framework. OpenCL 3.0 cleared out a lot of the cruft from OpenCL 2.x so it's seeing a lot more adoption. The most cross-platform solution is still OpenCL 1.2, largely for MacOS, but OpenCL 3.0 is becoming more and more common for Windows and Linux and multiple devices. Even on platforms without native OpenCL support there are compatibility layers that implement OpenCL on top of DirectX (OpenCLOn12) or Vulkan (clvk and clspv).

> If there is a future with this idea, its gotta be just shipping the LLM with game right?

That might be a nice application for this library of mine: https://github.com/Const-me/Cgml/

That’s an open source Mistral ML model implementation which runs on GPUs (all of them, not just nVidia), takes 4.5GB on disk, uses under 6GB of VRAM, and optimized for interactive single-user use case. Probably fast enough for that application.

You wouldn’t want in-game dialogues with the original model though. Game developers would need to finetune, retrain and/or do something else with these weights and/or my implementation.

If you just want to run Mistral on Windows, you could try my port: https://github.com/Const-me/Cgml/tree/master/Mistral/Mistral...

The setup is relatively easy: install .NET runtime, download 4.5 GB model file from BitTorrent, unpack a small ZIP file and run the EXE.

Speaking about random sampling during inference, most ML models are doing it rather inefficiently.

Here’s a better way: https://github.com/Const-me/Cgml/blob/master/Readme.md#rando...

My HLSL is easily portable to CUDA, which has `__syncthreads` and `atomicInc` intrinsics.

I did a few times with Direct3D 11 compute shaders. Here’s an open-source example: https://github.com/Const-me/Cgml

Pretty sure Vulkan gonna work equally well, at the very least there’s an open source DXVK project which implements D3D11 on top of Vulkan.

Here’s an example of a custom 4 bits/weight codec for ML weights:

https://github.com/Const-me/Cgml/blob/master/Readme.md#bcml1...

llama.cpp does it slightly differently but still, AFAIK their quantized data formats are conceptually similar to my codec.

> the API was high-friction due to the shader language, and the glue between shader and CPU

Direct3D 11 compute shaders share these things with Vulkan, yet D3D11 is relatively easy to use. For example, see that library which implements ML-targeted compute shaders for C# with minimal friction: https://github.com/Const-me/Cgml The backend implemented in C++ is rather simple, just binds resources and dispatches these shaders.

I think the main usability issue with Vulkan is API design. Vulkan was only designed with AAA game engines in mind. The developers of these game engines have borderline unlimited budgets, and their requirements are very different from ordinary folks who want to leverage GPU hardware.

Minor update https://github.com/Const-me/Cgml/releases/tag/1.1a Can’t edit that comment anymore, too late.

For implementing stuff from scratch, if you use Windows you could try my C# based library for that: https://github.com/Const-me/Cgml/

It’s vendor agnostic, so HLSL instead of CUDA or Triton. Here’s the compute shaders implementing inference of Mistral-7B model: https://github.com/Const-me/Cgml/tree/master/Mistral/Mistral...