Re: [9fans] Drawterm GPU (was: Software philosophy)

["Frank D. Engel, Jr." <fde101@fjrhome.net>]

While not necessarily unwelcome as a possibility, I don't think 
GPU-based drawing/gaming is as relevant to this discussion (or as 
important of a goal for Plan 9 / 9front) as is GPU compute (GPGPU).

The ability to leverage GPU resources across CPU servers for computation 
purposes would be of great benefit to the platform, and working out a 
driver interface by starting the process remotely via drawterm seems 
like a sensible step in that direction.

On 8/22/21 3:07 AM, sirjofri wrote:
>
> 22.08.2021 05:16:42 Eli Cohen <echoline@gmail.com>:
>> deep learning is another interest of mine too. hardware support is a
>> big deal for that... some kind of support for GPUs would be nice.
>> people have discussed that for years... hardware drivers are difficult
>> and important to do correctly!
>>
>> I always really liked the "XCPU" and drawterm type ideas of using
>> other OSes for their existing strengths along with Plan 9. maybe
>> drawterm could have a GPU device driver or something... that being
>> said I have sometimes found it ends up surprisingly easier doing it
>> all on Plan 9...
> 
> That's also something I thought about a few times already: drawterm
> with GPU support. The only issue I see is, for realtime applications
> like games the draw times would be network bound and thus pretty slow.
> It would work for heavy GPU applications where almost no draw calls
> will exist (no textures, very low poly meshes, ...), but for heavier
> stuff we'd need to address that.
> 
> That's the benefit of a native driver: you could calculate the server
> side (heavy CPU calculations) on a cpu server, the client/frontend
> side (including draw calls) on a terminal and the pure graphics on the
> GPU.
> 
> I'd still give the drawterm GPU a shot. Maybe I can set drawterm up
> for compilation on my work PC (two GTX 1080Ti) and try figuring out
> how to do all that stuff. However, I've never done graphics
> applications on windows or somewhere else that uses OpenGL or DirectX
> (I'd try OpenGL because portability), only written shaders so far.
> I'll surely need some time (which is always rare as a game developer).
> 
> Btw I don't know the exact specifications for GPU usage for neural
> networks. I assume it's all compute shaders? Maybe it's even a kinda
> blackbox, put stuff in (draw call), read things out. I assume this can
> work perfectly fine for draw times, depending on the data.
> 
> sirjofri

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