GPUs, Part 1: The Feynman Technique

There's a lot of writing about the Feynman Technique, but essentially it boils down to the idea that if you want to learn something, you should try to explain it to a 12-year-old. I'm not a 12-year-old, but I am a first year compsci, which is basically the same thing. I have two problems with GPUs. Firstly, I don't understand them. Secondly, I don't know of any 12-year-old-level resources to learn with. Here, I'll try to kill two birds with one stone.

In this series I'll explore GPUs as general-purpose compute engines, their characteristics, and how one can learn to harness them for good. During this journey I'll try to document what I find in a way that allows any curious computer scientist to follow along at home. We can worry about the 12-year-olds later.

My favourite language is Rust and I don't really know how to write anything else so I'll be aiming to use only Rust, at least on the CPU side. If possible, I'll use rust-gpu for GPU-side code as well.

# Why bother

GPUs are becoming more relevant as new people come up with new work to do, and Moore's law fails to deliver on its promise of increasing single thread performance to do it with¹. GPUs sidestep this problem by adding more threads. Their main strength is in tasks where some operation is applied over many inputs independently (like with SIMD - more on that later), but with some clever tricks they can beat CPUs in tasks that at a glance don't seem parallel at all. It's hard to turn a traditional sequential program into one that plays nicely on a GPU, but depending on the workload, it can really pay off. This transformation is what I aim to get familiar with.

Although they are big and scary and foreign, I think that with some time and some honest work even a first year like me could tame the beast. I want to, because they're really fast, and it would make me feel powerful and smart. Your motives may be different, and that's OK.

To be clear, I'm not too bothered about the traditional 3D graphics pipeline with its ROPs and TMUs and geometry. Although it would be nice to understand that stuff, I'll be focusing more on general computation to start with.

# Goals

My personal goal for this series is to be able to understand piet-gpu from start to finish. piet-gpu is a 2D vector graphics renderer designed to leverage GPU compute to do what has historically been done on CPUs. Whether I'll be able to do this will probably become clear in a few months, but really it's not about the treasure, it's about the friends we made along the way.

To get to piet-gpu, by my estimates, we'll need to understand a few things about GPUs:

• GPU architecture - how do they run programs?
• CPU-side APIs - how to tell a GPU to run a program
• I/O - moving data between GPU memory and main memory
• Algorithmic techniques - taking tasks that look sequential and reframing them until they can be done efficiently in parallel

# Conclusion

This will be a fun exercise in self-motivation I guess. I've learned some cool stuff so far, so I'm optimistic about how far we'll get. The next post, a first look into GPU architecture, should come quite soon. I hope to see you there!