Rust CUDA Project

Summary

The Rust CUDA Project An ecosystem of libraries and tools for writing and executing extremely fast GPU code fully in Rust Guide | Getting Started | Features ⚠️ The project is still in early development, expect bugs, safety issues, and things that don't work ⚠️ Important This project is no longer dormant and is being rebooted. Please contribute! Goal The Rust CUDA Project is a project aimed at making Rust a tier-1 language for extremely fast GPU computing using the CUDA Toolkit. It provides tools for compiling Rust to extremely fast PTX code as well as libraries for using existing CUDA libraries with it. Background Historically, general purpose high performance GPU computing has been done using the CUDA toolkit. The CUDA toolkit primarily provides a way to use Fortran/C/C++ code for GPU computing in tandem with CPU code with a single source. It also provides many libraries, tools, forums, and documentation to supplement the single-source CPU/GPU code. CUDA is exclusively an NVIDIA-only toolkit. Many tools have been proposed for cross-platform GPU computing such as OpenCL, Vulkan Computing, and HIP. However, CUDA remains the most used toolkit for such tasks by far. This is why it is imperative to make Rust a viable option for use with the CUDA toolkit. However, CUDA with Rust has been a historically very rocky road. The only viable option until now has been to use the LLVM PTX backend, however, the LLVM PTX backend does not always work and would generate invalid PTX for many common Rust operations, and in recent years it has been shown time and time again that a specialized solution is needed for Rust on the GPU with the advent of projects such as rust-gpu (for Rust -> SPIR-V). Our hope is that with this project we can push the Rust GPU computing industry forward and make Rust an excellent language for such tasks. Rust offers plenty of benefits such as __restrict__ performance benefits for every kernel, An excellent module/crate system, delimiting of unsafe areas of C...