Re: Have GPGPU support in guix?

[Fis Trivial]

Joshua Branson writes:

> Fis Trivial <address@hidden> writes:
>
>> Hi Guixs, this is actually a feature wish.
>>
>> I tried to use guix to manage many of my softwares on my system, but
>> some dependencies are missing which is blocking a full transition to
>> Guix based system and development environment. Most notably is GPU
>> computing support.
>>
>> My daily routine is doing machine learning, which requires GPU for
>> computing nowadays. Currently I need to use CUDA from NVidia, as many of
>> you might know, it's not free software, not even an open source
>> software. However, it's the de fato toolchain in deep learning
>> community, so basically it's a must have dependency for most of the
>> related libraries if you want decent performance. Time passes and
>> hardwork have been done, now we have some libraries ported to OpenCL or
>> HIP (from AMD), it's not mature yet but I think we have a pretty good
>> shot at working them out in near future.
>
> Since this is a GNU endorsed distro, guixSD will never have an official
> way to install or use CUDA.  There might eventually be an unofficial way
> to install it someday via a guile potlock (or is it the guild command).
> But I wouldn't recommend using it.  No one will seriously test it or
> ensure that it works well.
>

I want to get rid of CUDA, I am really tired of dealing with it. That's
why I'm counting on OpenCL or HIP.

>>
>> However, I wanted to manage all of these with guix so that we can have a
>> unified dependency tree. Currently there are a few options for OpenCL
>> runtime. Namely, beignet, neo from Intel, ROCm stack from AMD, the POCL
>> project and the implementation in mesa.
>
> This is probably doable.
>
>>
>> I tried to package beignet (an old OpenCL runtime from Intel) but it
>> wasn't successful due to failed tests (it failed from recognizing
>> device).
>> https://github.com/trivialfis/guixpkgs/blob/master/opencl.scm
>>
>> To support GPU computing, we need a full stack of softwares, from kernel
>> to user space libraries. When it comes to low level part I got have
>> litte to no knowledge, so I am hoping someone here can provide some
>> help/insight for having GPU computing libraries in Guix.
>>
>> Thanks.

Thanks.