Rust-CUDA is being rebooted!

[LegNeato]

See https://rust-gpu.github.io/blog/2025/01/27/rust-cuda-reboot.

@RDambrosio016 has made me a new maintainer (I'm also a maintainer of rust-gpu).

Please comment here if you would like to be involved, or better yet put up some PRs or direct me to what needs to be done from your perspective!

[AnubhabB]

This is exciting! I'd love to contribute (if I can). Any areas to dig deep into? That would probably help with figuring out starting points and if at-all I'd be capable enough to contribute!

In any case .. cheers .. will closely follow how this evolves!

[LegNeato]

I'm still orienting myself as to the current state. I'd start with just trying to get the examples running on your machine and see if you hit anything I do not! Thank you so much for (potentially) helping. 🍻

[David-OConnor]

The big thing is to make it work. Try it on a few different machines (OS, GPUs, CUDA versions etc), make it work on modern RustC and CUDA versions without errors. I switched to Cudarc because that is in a working state, and this isn't.

Dropping support for older versions of CUDA is fine if that makes it easier.

[apriori]

The big thing is to make it work. Try it on a few different machines (OS, GPUs, CUDA versions etc), make it work on modern RustC and CUDA versions without errors. I switched to Cudarc because that is in a working state, and this isn't.

That will be quite some work. Rustc changed significantly, so did libNVVM.

@LegNeato As you are a maintainer of rust-gpu, I would be curious to know what in the end lead you to rust-cuda. Afaik rust-gpu did not enter the compute kernel area too much.

[LegNeato]

@apriori Actually, Rust-GPU does have pretty good support for Vulkan compute! It's just that Embark and most current contributors are focused on graphics use-cases. I personally care more about GPGPU.

What lead me here is I see a lot of opportunities and overlap between the two projects. As an end user writing GPU code in Rust, what I really want is to not care about Vulkan vs CUDA as the output target at all, similar to how I don't care about linux vs windows when writing CPU rust (or arm vs x86_64 for that matter). Of course, we also need to expose platform-specific stuff for those wanting to get the most out of their hardware or ecosystem (similar to how rust on the CPU exposes platform specific apis or ISA-specific escape hatches), but the progressive disclosure of complexity is key.

This wasn't going to happen as two completely separate projects that only peek over the fence occasionally, or with rust-cuda no longer being developed. So I am involved in both and can hopefully bring them together where they are different for different's sake.

[txbm]

Will contribute

[buk0vec]

Would definitely love to help out, I think this is a really cool project

[Schmiedium]

I'd definitely like to contribute and get involved if I can. I'm currently a Master's Student at Georgia Tech and taking a Parallel algorithms course this semester. I have a few different machines, cards, and Operating systems I can try to put the current iteration on and see what issues pop up

[LegNeato]

@Schmiedium Awesome! I think one thing everyone is going to hit is we are on a super old version of rust and cargo automatically upgrading versions will hit issues. I'm trying to untangle that a bit currently.