Launch HN: ParaQuery (YC X25) – GPU Accelerated Spark/SQL
Hey HN! I'm Win, founder of ParaQuery (https://paraquery.com), a fully-managed, GPU-accelerated Spark + SQL solution. We deliver BigQuery's ease of use (or easier) while being significantly more cost-efficient and performant.
Here's a short demo video demonstrating ParaQuery (vs. BigQuery) on a simple ETL job: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uu379YnccGU
It's well known that GPUs are very good for many SQL and dataframe tasks, at least by researchers and GPU companies like NVIDIA. So much so that, in 2018, NVIDIA launched the RAPIDS program and the Spark-RAPIDS plugin (https://github.com/NVIDIA/spark-rapids). I actually found out because, at the time, I was trying to craft a CUDA-based lambda calculus interpreter…one of several ideas I didn't manage to implement, haha.
There seems to be a perception among at least some engineers that GPUs are only good for AI, graphics, and maybe image processing (maybe! someone actually told me they thought GPUs are bad for image processing!) Traditional data processing doesn’t come to mind. But actually GPUs are good for this as well!
At a high level, big data processing is a high-throughput, massively parallel workload. GPUs are a type of hardware specialized for this, are highly programmable, and (now) happen to be highly available on the cloud! Even better, GPU memory is tuned for bandwidth over raw latency, which only improves their throughput capabilities compared to a CPU. And by just playing with cloud cost calculators for a couple of minutes, it's clear that GPUs are cost-effective even on the major clouds.
To be honest, I thought using GPUs for SQL processing would have taken off by now, but it hasn't. So, just over a year ago, I started working on actually deploying a cloud-based data platform powered by GPUs (i.e. Spark-RAPIDS), spurred by a friend-of-a-friend(-of-a-friend) who happened to have BigQuery cost concerns at his startup. After getting a proof of concept done and a letter of intent... well, nothing happened! Even after over half a year. But then, something magical did happen: their cloud credits ran out!
And now, they're saving over 60% off of their BigQuery bill by using ParaQuery, while also being 2x faster -- with zero data migration needed (courtesy of Spark's GCS connector). By the way, I'm not sure about other people's experiences but... we're pretty far from being IO-bound (to the surprise of many engineers I've spoken to).
I think that the future of high-throughput compute is computing on high-throughput hardware. If you think so too, or you have scaling data challenges, you can sign up here: https://paraquery.com/waitlist. Sorry for the waitlist, but we're not ready for a self-serve experience just yet—it would front-load significant engineering and hardware cost. But we’ll get there, so stay tuned!
Thanks for reading! What have your experiences been with huge ETL / processing loads? Was cost or performance an issue? And what do you think about GPU acceleration (GPGPU)? Did you think GPUs were simply expensive? Would love to just talk about tech here!
Congrats on the launch!
I contributed to the NVIDIA Spark RAPIDS project for ~4 years and for the past year have been contributing to DataFusion Comet, so I have some experience in Spark acceleration and I have some questions!
1. Given the momentum behind the existing OSS Spark accelerators (Spark RAPIDS, Gluten + Velox, DataFusion Comet), have you considered collaborating with and/or extending these projects? All of them are multi-year efforts with dedicated teams. Both Spark RAPIDS and Gluten + Velox are leveraging GPUs already.
2. You mentioned that "We're fully compatible with Spark SQL (and Spark)." and that is very impressive if true. None of the existing accelerators claim this. Spark compatibility is notoriously difficult with Spark accelerators built with non-JVM languages and alternate hardware architectures. You have to deal with different floating-point implementations and regex engines, for example.
Also, Spark has some pretty quirky behavior. Do you match Spark when casting the string "T2" to a timestamp, for example? Spark compatibility has been pretty much the bulk of the work in my experience so far.
Providing acceleration at the same time as guaranteeing the same behavior as Spark is difficult and the existing accelerators provide many configuration options to allow users to choose between performance and compatibility. I'm curious to hear your take on this topic and where your focus is on performance vs compatibility.
1. Yes! Would love to contribute back to these projects, since I am already using RAPIDS under the hood. My general goal is to bring GPU acceleration to more workloads. Though, as solo founder, I am finding it difficult to have any time for this at the moment, haha.
2. Hmm, maybe I should mention that we're not "accelerating all operations" -- merely compatible. Spark-RAPIDS has the goal of being byte-for-byte compatible unless incompatible ops are specifically allowed. But... you might be right about that kind of quirk. Would not be surprising, and reminds me of checking behavior between compilers.
I'd say the default should be a focus on compatibility, and work through any extra perf stuff with our customers. Maybe a good quick way to contribute back to open source is to first upstream some tests?
Thanks for your great questions :)
> I was trying to craft a CUDA-based lambda calculus interpreter
This is awesome!
I assume you have seen https://github.com/HigherOrderCO/Bend https://github.com/higherorderco/hvm
Previous discussions https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Indeed I have, though I have some reservations about its focus on interaction nets (or rather, its marketing).
I ended up making a CUDA-based, data-parallel STLC typechecker (Hindley-Milner)... I want to formally prove its correctness first, but maybe a blog post would be okay either way.
This could be incredibly useful for me. Currently struggling to complete jobs with massive amounts of shuffle with Spark on EMR (large joins yielding 150+ billion rows). We use Glue currently, but it has become cost prohibitive.
You should try using an S3 based shuffle plugin: https://github.com/IBM/spark-s3-shuffle
Then mount FSX for Lustre on all of your EMR nodes and have it write shuffle data there. It will massively improve performance and shuffle issues will disappear.
Is expensive though. But you can offset the cost now because you can run entirely Spot instances for your workers as if you lose a node there's no recomputation of the shuffle data.
Is the shuffle the biggest issue? Not too sure about joins but one of the datasets we're currently dealing with has a couple trillion rows. Would love to chat about this!
Congrats on the launch.
This reminds me of https://www.heavy.ai/ (previously MapD back in 2015/16?)
Any relationship with the PG-Strom project?
http://heterodb.github.io/pg-strom/
No relationship... yet! Hoping to have a good relationship in the future so I have a business reason to fly to Japan :D
Btw, interesting thing they said here: "By utilization of GPU (Graphic Processor Unit) device which has thousands cores per chip"
It's more like "hundreds", since the number of "real" cores is like (CUDA cores / 32). Though I think we're about to see 1k cores (SMSPs).
That being said, I do believe CUDA cores have more interesting capabilities than a typical vector lane, i.e. for memory operations (thank the compiler). Would love to be corrected!
Congrats on the launch!
Im curious about what kinds of workloads you see GPU-accelerated compute have a significant impact, and what kinds still pose challenges. You mentioned that I/O is not the bottleneck, is that still true for queries that require large scale shuffles?
Large scale shuffles: Absolutely. One of the larger queries we ran saw a 450TB shuffle -- this may require more than just deploying the spark-rapids plugin, however (depends on the query itself and specific VMs used). Shuffling was the majority of the time and saw 100% (...99%?) GPU utilization. I presume this is partially due to compressing shuffle partitions. Network/disk I/O is definitely not the bottleneck here.
It's difficult to say what "workloads" are significant, and easier to talk about what doesn't really work AFAIK. Large-scale shuffles might see 4x efficiency, assuming you can somehow offload the hash shuffle memory, have scalable fast storage, etc... which we do. Note this is even on GCP, where there isn't any "great" networking infra available.
Things that don't get accelerated include multi-column UDFs and some incompatible operations. These aren't physical/logical limitations, it's just where the software is right now: https://github.com/NVIDIA/spark-rapids/issues
Multi-column UDF support would likely require some compiler-esque work in Scala (which I happen to have experience in).
A few things I expect to be "very" good: joins, string aggregations (empirically), sorting (clustering). Operations which stress memory bandwidth will likely be "surprisingly" good (surprising to most people).
Otherwise, Nvidia has published a bunch of really-good-looking public data, along with some other public companies.
Outside of Spark, I think many people underestimate how "low-latency" GPUs can be. 100 microseconds and above is highly likely to be a good fit for GPU acceleration in general, though that could be as low as 10 microseconds (today).
8TB/s bandwidth on the B200 helps :-) [yes, yes, that is at the high end, but 4.8TB/s@H200, 4TB/s@H100, 2TB/s@A100 is nothing to sneeze at either).
Very true. Can't get those numbers even if you get an entire single-tenant CPU VM. Minor note, A100 40G is 1.5TB/s (and much easier to obtain).
That being said, ParaQuery mainly uses T4 and L4 GPUs with "just" ~300 GB/s bandwidth. I believe (correct me if I'm wrong) that should be around a 64-core VM, though obviously dependent on the actual VM family.
Many of us have been using GPU accelerated Spark for years:
https://developer.nvidia.com/rapids/
https://github.com/NVIDIA/spark-rapids
And it's supported on AWS: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/emr/latest/ReleaseGuide/emr-spar...
Indeed, Spark-RAPIDS has been around for a while! And it's quite simple to have a setup that works. Most of the issues come after the initial PoC, especially for teams not wanting to manage infra, not to mention GPU infra.
> they're saving over 60% off of their BigQuery bill
how big is their data?
A lot of BigQuery users would be surprised to find they don't need BigQuery.
This[0] post (written by founding engineer of BigQuery) has a bit of hyperbole, but this part is inline with my experience:
> A couple of years ago I did an analysis of BigQuery queries, looking at customers spending more than $1000 / year. 90% of queries processed less than 100 MB of data. I sliced this a number of different ways to make sure it wasn’t just a couple of customers who ran a ton of queries skewing the results. I also cut out metadata-only queries, which are a small subset of queries in BigQuery that don’t need to read any data at all. You have to go pretty high on the percentile range until you get into the gigabytes, and there are very few queries that run in the terabyte range.
We're[1] built on duckdb and I couldn't be happier about it. Insanely easy to get started with, runs locally and client-side in WASM, great language features.
0 - https://motherduck.com/blog/big-data-is-dead/
1 - https://www.definite.app/
They have >1PB of data to ETL, with some queries hitting 450TB of pure shuffle.
It's very true that most users don't need something like BigQuery or Snowflake. That's why some startups have come up to save Snowflake cost by "simply" putting a postgres instance in front of it!
In fact, I just advised someone recently to simply use Postgres instead of BigQuery since they had <1TB and their queries weren't super intensive.
> A lot of BigQuery users would be surprised to find they don't need BigQuery.
No they wouldn't.
a) BigQuery is the only managed, supported solution on GCP for SQL based analytical workloads. And they are using it because they started with GCP and then chose BigQuery.
b) I have supported hundreds of Data Scientists over the years using Spark and it is nothing like BigQuery. You need to have much more awareness of how it all fits together because it is sitting on a JVM that when exposed to memory pressure will do a full GC and kill the executor. When this happens at best your workload gets significantly slower and at worst your job fails.
Hopefully, we can be another managed solution for those on GCP.
And as for your second point, yep, Spark tuning is definitely annoying! BigQuery is a lot more than jusr the engine, and building a simple interface for a complicated, high-performance process is hard. That's a big reason why I made ParaQuery.
You may want to look into DataMechanics who is another YC startup who tried something similar. They were acqui-hired by NetApp.
If I remember they focused on SME space because in enterprise you will likely struggle against pre-allocated cloud spend budgets which lock companies into just using GCP services. I've worked at a dozen enterprise companies now and every one had this.
Enterprises can deploy on their own GCP, and we're planning on releasing on GCP Marketplace.
For a similar cost, what if their pipeline were 5x faster, and they don't have to dealing with managing the deployment themselves?
Thanks for telling me about DataMechanics
a) Enterprises have almost entirely moved away from self-hosting software. GCP Marketplace is fine but I would probably also look at a Kubernetes option as many companies have GKE clusters.
b) It won't be 5x faster though and I wrongly recommend you don't take a marketing attitude when selling this type of software. Because it will be mostly technical engineers and architects deciding on this and we aren't stupid. I have run GPU accelerated Spark clusters for years for enterprise companies and you will be able to accelerate the query part of the pipeline but that's like 20% of what a typical job does.
a) Since being fully-managed is one of my value props, that's probably better for us.
b) Of course I'm only accelerating the Spark/query part. Not sure what you mean. And in that case, I took a query which was 44 minutes on BigQuery and ran it with a "comparable" cluster on ParaQuery in 5.5 minutes. Perf is slightly variable, so maybe it's 40 minutes vs 6 minutes. In that case, ParaQuery would still be 6.5x faster, and >2x cheaper. That being said, it was just a benchmark ETL query with some random data (50b rows), and these things do vary between workloads.
So yeah, without knowing more about the use case you're talking about, hard to say. Even Nvidia has a hard time optimizing certain TPS-DS queries btw, so it's not like I can just 5x anything!
> No they wouldn't.
haha, you're giving people way too much credit. Tons of people make bad software purchasing decisions. It's hard, people make mistakes.
It reminds me of Hadoop days, where the data would be stored in the HDFS and you would use mapreduce to process it. However, the concept was to send computation to the location of the data.
This really make sense. I might be a little out of touch. I wonder, do you incur transfer cost when you data is in buckets and you process by bringing data to the compute.
If you stand up your compute cluster in the same region as your bucket, there are no egress fees. Otherwise, yes, in general. There are some clouds that don't have egress fees though, i.e. Cloudflare R2.
I'm surprised the GPU is a win when the data is coming from GCS. The CPU still has to touch all the data, right? Or do you have some mechanism to keep warm data live in the GPUs?
Yep, CPU has to transfer data because no RDMA setup on GCP lol. But that's like 16-32 GB/s of transfer per GPU (assuming T4/L4 nodes), which is much more than network bandwidth. And we're not even network bound, even if there's no warm data (i.e. for our ETL workloads). However, there is some stuff kept on GPU during actual execution for each Spark task even if they aren't running on the GPU at the moment, which makes handling memory and partition sizes... "fun", haha.
I've used GPU based Spark SQL for many years now and it sounds flashy but it's not going to make a meaningful difference for most use cases.
As you say the issue is that you have an overall process to optimise from getting the data off slow GCS onto the nodes, shuffling it which often then writes it to a slow disk before the real processing even starts then writing back to a slow GCS.
Not sure what your use cases are, but I haven't had too much issue seeing good gains vs bare Spark -- GCS has not been my bottleneck.
would you be able to share a runtime with operator breakdown for the curious ones among us?
That's a pretty interesting idea, might take a bit to prepare a useful graphic/post.
Also, what do you think would be the best way to structure such a post?
But, here's a small bit of something perf-y: during large shuffles, I was able to increase overall job performance/efficiency by using external shuffles, even with times of ~5s median shuffle write for a couple hundred MB partitions (I hope I'm remembering this correctly, lol). This is not particularly great, but it did allow for cost-efficiently chewing through some rather large datasets without dealing with memory issues. There's also an awesome side benefit in that it allows us to use cheap spot workers in more scenarios.
congrats on the launch! curious what solution you have for the data locality problem, especially when integrating with s3/gcs/blobstore
Depends on the workload. Spark can persist dataframes to the cluster as normal. GPUs can also load certain datasets significantly faster.
Unrelated question, but how was the process of getting backed by ycombinator like?
Well, I was rejected 4 times (once for a completely unrelated idea though).
The reason I got in was because I actually got traction, but I'm sure my successive failed applications helped a teeny bit at least.
So... pretty straightforward... I think?
this is super cool stuff, and would've been really interesting to apply to spark stuff I had to do for Amazon's search system! How is this different than something like using spark-rapids on AWS EMR with GPU-enabled EC2 instances? Are you building on top of that spark-rapids, or is this a more custom solution?
Good question -- it depends. For certain workloads, it might look exactly the same! For others, I found that the memory and VM constraints were creating large inefficiencies. Also, many teams simply don't want to manage that level of data infra: managing EMR, instance type optimization, spark optimization (now with GPU configs!), custom images, upgrades, etc.
We take care of that and make it as easy as pie... or so we hope! On top of that, we also deploy an external shuffle service, and deal with other plugins, connectors, etc.
I suppose it's similar to using Databricks Serverless SQL!
Another thing: we ran into an incompatible (i.e. non-accelerated) operation in one of our first real workloads, so we worked with our customer to speed up that workload even more with a small query optimization.
> I started working on actually deploying a cloud-based data platform powered by GPUs (i.e. Spark-RAPIDS)
Based on this, the platform is using Spark-RAPIDS.
couple weeks ago at VeloxCon one of the days was dedicated to GPU processing (the other being AI/ML data preprocessing); the cuDF team talked about their Velox integration as well. for those interested, might worth to check it out.
disclaimer: my team is working on this very problem as well, as I was a speaker at VeloxCon.
Just checked out Velox. It's awesome that you're reducing duplicate eng effort! What was your talk about?
I was part of the panel discussion at the end of the 2nd day discussing hardware acceleration for query processing. before the panel there were very interesting talks about various approaches on how to get to the end goal, which is to efficiently use hardware (non-x86 CPUs, so mostly either GPUs or FPGAs/custom chips) to speed up queries.
Since you mentioned non-x86, how are things on the ARM side? I believe I heard AWS's Graviton + Correto combo was a huge increase for JVM efficiency.
FPGAs... I somehow highly doubt their efficiency in terms of being the "core" (heh) processor. However, "compute storage" with FPGAs right next to the flash is really interesting.
Congrats on the launch, Win! I remember seeing your prototype a while ago and its awesome to see your progress!
Great, let me know if you want a 1x AMD MI300x VM to build/test on. Free.
https://x.com/HotAisle/status/1921983426972025023
Nice! I attended a hackathon by Modular last weekend where we got to play with MI300X (sponsored by AMD and Crusoe). My team made a GPU-"accelerated" BM25 in Mojo, but mostly kind of failed at it, haha.
The software stack for AMD is still a bit too nascent for ParaQuery's Spark engine, but certain realtime/online workloads can definitely be programmed pretty fast. They also happen to benefit greatly from the staggering levels of HBM on AMD chips. Hopefully I can take a mini-vacation later in the summer to hack on your GPUs :)
Great feedback and thanks for the follow on twitter.
Agreed, their software stack needs work, but thankfully that's why they are sponsoring developer events like you attended. The progress is happening fast and this is something that wasn't happening at all 6-12 months ago. It is a real shift in focus.
If you have specific areas you'd like me to pass up the chain for them in order for you to build support for your engine, please let me know and I'm happy to try to help however I can. It took a while for us to get there, but they are now extremely responsive to us.
All the Spark GPU acceleration right now is done via the Spark-RAPIDS plugin, so HIP would somehow have to support that. Since cuDF is the core part and hipDF is a thing, it might be doable in the near future.
Oh, interesting! Thanks for the additional context.
This is one area where it is clear that Nvidia is a leader by not only providing the underlying kernels, but also the overall product framework integrations. One would have to port that entire plugin project over, which would probably be a ton of work to maintain.
For what it is worth, AMD just recently released two blog posts on hipDF, so at least they are putting that effort in.
https://rocm.blogs.amd.com/artificial-intelligence/cupy_hipd...
https://rocm.blogs.amd.com/artificial-intelligence/hipDF_pan...
Thanks for the links! I'm planning on contributing kernels back to open source, so will think of a way to be vendor agnostic. As far as I understand, HIP should make that doable.
hipify attempts to do that, but it potentially requires you to maintain two source trees, which isn't optimal. In this case, you'd want to run a CI/CD to convert your CUDA code at build time and compile that. But I think there are edge cases where that isn't possible.
As you learned at the event, Modular is trying to make it more transparent by abstracting to a whole new language (Mojo).
Another solution coming down the line which doesn't require changes to your CUDA code, nor learning a new language is: https://docs.scale-lang.com/
Thanks for the link! Not the first time I came across it, but it's a good one.
If I had to bet on the longer term, I think that something like Mojo will win out -- a programming language (mostly) agnostic to the underlying vector processor hardware. Similar to how Rust can target various SIMD implementations, though I've only dabbled in that.
Cool project, congratulations.
How would you contrast it against HeavyDB?
https://github.com/heavyai/heavydb
I'm not too familiar with HeavyDB, but here are the main differences:
- We're fully compatible with Spark SQL (and Spark). Meaning little to no migration overhead.
- Our focus is on distributed compute first.
- That means ParaQuery isn't a database, just an MPP engine (for now). Also means no data ingestion/migration needed.
Awesome to see GPUs being used for something other than crypto (are they still?) and AI.
How is it priced? I couldn't see anything on the site.
Still figuring out pricing! For our first customers, we're doing pricing as either bytes scanned or by compute time, similar to BigQuery. Also experimenting with a contract that also gives the minimum of the two potential charges (up to a sustainable limit).
However, for deployments to the customer's cloud, it would be a stereotypical enterprise license + support.
Can't wait to actually add an FAQ to the site, hopefully based off the questions asked here. Pricing is one of the things preventing me from just allowing self-serve, since it has to be stable, sustainable, and cheap!
Also, with the GPU clouds, pricing would have to be different per cloud, though I guess I can worry about that later. Would be crazy cheap(er) to process on them.
As far as I know, GPUs are definitely still being used in crypto/web3... and AI for that matter :P
After ETH PoS, GPUs are no longer used for wide scale crypto mining.
I'm super excited about this. I saw an early demo and it's epic. Congrats on the launch, Win!
Thanks! I was also told to make a performance-focused demo... didn't do it in time, but was able to go from a 44-minute BigQuery job to a 5.5-minute ParaQuery job, with a similar dataset/query as the video here.
8x faster!
Very cool and great job! Would love to see more as you progress on your journey!
So nice to see GPU's being used for classical reasons again.
Not sure if Spark is a classical portion for GPU compute ;) Well, outside of HPC and research.
SQL on GPUs is definitely a research classic, dating back to 2004 at least: https://gamma.cs.unc.edu/DB/
Came here to say the same thing.
Set Theory is the classical foundation of SQL:
https://www.sqlshack.com/mathematics-sql-server-fast-introdu...
It's analogous to how functional programming expressed through languages like lisp is the classical foundation of spreadsheets.
I believe that skipping first principles (sort of like premature optimization) is the root of all evil. Some other examples:
- If TCP had been a layer above UDP instead of its own protocol beside it, we would have had real peer to peer networking this whole time instead of needing WebRTC.
- If we had a common serial communication standard analogous to TCP for sockets, then we wouldn't need different serial ports like USB, Thunderbolt and HDMI.
- If we hid the web browser's progress bar and used server-side rendering with forms, we could implement the rich interfaces of single-page applications with vastly reduced complexity by keeping the state, logic and validation in one place with no perceptible change for the average user.
- If there was a common scripting language bundled into all operating systems, then we could publish native apps as scripts with substantially less code and not have to choose between web and mobile for example.
- If we had highly multicore CPUs with hundreds or thousands of cores, then multiprocessing, 3D graphics and AI frameworks could be written as libraries running on them instead of requiring separate GPUs.
And it's not just tech. The automative industry lacks standard chassis types and even OEM parts. We can't buy Stirling engines or Tesla turbines off the shelf. CIGS solar panels, E-ink displays, standardized removable batteries, thermal printers for ordinary paper, heck even "close enough" contact lenses, where are these products?
We make a lot of excuses for why the economy is bad, but just look at how much time and effort we waste by having to use cookie cutter solutions instead of having access to the underlying parts and resources we need. I don't think that everyone is suddenly becoming neurodivergent from vaccines or some other scapegoat, I think it's just become so obvious that the whole world is broken and rigged to work us all to the grave to make some guy rich that it's giving all of us ADHD symptoms from having to cope with it.
I'm not sure about the rest of your comment, but we would likely still want GPUs even with highly multicore CPUs. Case in point: the upper-range Threadripper series.
It makes sense to have two specialized systems: a low-latency system, and a high-throughput system, as it's a real tradeoff. Most people/apps need low-latency.
As for throughput and efficiency... turns out that shaving off lots of circuitry allows you to power less circuitry! GPUs have a lot of sharing going on and not a lot of "smarts". That doesn't even touch on their integrated throughput optimized DRAM (VRAM/HBM). So... not quite. We'd still be gaming on GPUs :)
Ya I winced after I wrote that and am considering taking a break from posting for a while. I'm just really tired of suffering the status quo because many people love it if it aligns with their worldview, while people like me who see things a little differently seem condemned to struggle in isolation. I've always admired Tesla, not Edison, but the Edison way of doing business seems to win out and suppress the people on the fringe.
As for GPUs, they are useful for languages like GNU Octave (MATLAB) and Julia. Although there's a code smell with that. The matrix languages that would benefit most from SIMD seem to be the ones that aren't hardware accelerated on GPUs. Something has gone wrong:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8302256
That was over 10 years ago and I doubt the situation is any better today. Misaligned incentives.
I feel that the missing link is direct hardware access to the GPU ALUs. Without being able to transpile CPU code to GPU code and vice versa to provide bare metal multithreading and vector operations, we miss out on a whole branch of computer science. We can't do the interesting experiments that I always rant about, which would make stuff like genetic algorithms borderline trivial. We're stuck with cookie cutter solutions like OpenGL, Vulkan, Metal, etc.
Yet we still praise Nvidia, even though like Microsoft/Intel in the 1990s, they're probably most responsibly for stifling innovation in multicore computing.
For what it's worth, you're right about the latency/throughput tradeoff. I don't mind stuff like Intel's integrated graphics or Apple's M line of processors with integrated GPU and NPU cores for raw throughput and efficiency. I just think they're silly because they operate at the wrong layer: 1) CPU 2) multicore 3) GPU. There's no layer 2. Why is that?
Gotcha, no problem.
> while people like me who see things a little differently seem condemned to struggle in isolation
Haha, you should consider founder life then. I think many founders feel like this.
The issue with transpiling to GPUs is that it is really hard to do that in a sensible, performant way. Something something a sufficiently smart compiler... There is plenty of @jit in Python, and there's TornadoVM for JVM.
Nvidia's CUDA has been around since the 2000s and is somehow still best way to program for GPUs still. Probably the best SIMT-oriented stack at all, even. From my perspective, it's everyone else stifling themselves.
I realized after responding that I forgot what I meant to add - that I shouldn't have brought neurodivergence into the conversation. I believe that proponents of the status quo are vilifying outside-the-box thinking and the innate sense of justice prevalent in people on the spectrum because they feel threatened by them. But that's a generalization that makes assumptions about people and isn't constructive, so I'm sorry for saying that.
Anyway, ya I can see how founders get pretty well ostracized by the business community. I tried to be one back when I thought that shareware mailbox money meant winning the internet lottery. Statistically, it's highly unlikely that anyone can make it on their own now. It's not just that the system is rigged, but that founders who exit often take the money and run rather than changing the systems of control that they managed to overcome. To me, rising wealth inequality and deliberate ignorance of survivor bias indicate that the situation is getting worse, not better.
You're right about the sufficiently smart compiler, I hadn't heard that term in a while. I believe that functional programming (FP) and imperative programming (IP) are at opposite ends of the spectrum, and that FP is about simple formal determinism while IP is about easy informal convenience. I also believe that IP can never be fully optimized, due to the halting problem, exponential complexity from mutability, etc. Whereas FP might be optimizable because it can be statically analyzed. Usually IP code is broken down into FP segments which can be optimized, then maybe mutable code gets approximated with impurity or monads or left as a bottleneck. I dream of writing an IP language where all variables are const and there are no pointers or references, that's performant by way of copy-on-write and other techniques where the runtime does the heavy lifting instead of humans, so that it can be converted to/from FP and fully optimized. Without that, I don't see a practical way to convert CPU code to GPU code.
So it's really 2 problems that are unlikely to be solved any time soon:
1) we're using the wrong hardware
2) we're using the wrong software
The status quo won't fix this, and the game is rigged to prevent independents from fixing this, and that's why I'm not seeing any movement on these problems after observing them for over a quarter century.
AI will likely make things worse by glossing over the real work of fixing the fundamentals. Rather than writing provably correct code in an FP language like lisp and verifying it with behavior-driven development (BDD) integration tests for example, we'll trust the IP code written by AIs and skip verifying it.
So it's been over for a long time, and getting to be even more over than it was. Defeatism is the safest bet now, which I find heartbreaking. And that's what people will hear when they read my words, even though I'm fighting for a revolution in how we write code and how fast it runs. That's why it's over.
Edit: it's never over :)
Congrats on the launch! Interesting application.
Very cool, excited to see the journey.
congrats on the launch win! thrilled to see your product launch after following your journey from the start.
nobody so far mentioned Apache Gluten yet. are you familiar? how do you compare?
Apache DataFusion Comet also exists which is similar:
https://datafusion.apache.org/comet/
Both are stop gaps though since optimised SIMD accelerated Vector support is coming to the JVM albeit extremely slowly: https://openjdk.org/jeps/508
I was about to comment that Gluten is only targeting CPU vectorization, but then I found this (very cool!): https://github.com/apache/incubator-gluten/issues/9098
I'm not very familiar with Gluten, but I'll still comment on the CPU side though, assuming that one of Gluten's goals is to use the full vector processing (SIMD) potential of the CPU. In that case, we'd still be memory(-bandwidth)-bound, not to mention the significantly lower FLOPs of the CPU itself. If we vectorize Spark (or any MPP) for efficient compute, perhaps we should run it on hardware optimized for vectorized, super-parallel, high-throughput compute.
Also, there's nothing which says we can't use Gluten to have even more CPU+GPU utilization!
Congrats on the launch!
congrats on the launch! very cool
seriously impressive tech
congrats on the launch!!
very nice
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