Apple Silicon GPU Support in Mojo

I wouldn't mind a python flavor that has a syntax for tensors/matrices that was a bit less bolted on in parts vs Matlab. You get used to python and numpy's quirks it but it is a bit jarring at first.

Octave has a very nice syntax (it's an extended Matlab's syntax to provide the good parts of numpy broadcasting). I assume Julia uses something very similar to that. I have wanted to work with Julia but it's so frustrating to have to build so much of the non-interesting stuff that just exists in python. And back when I looked into it there didn't seem to be an easy way to just plug Julia into python things and incrementally move over. Like you couldn't swap the numerics and keep with matplotlib things you already had. You had to go learn Julia's ways of plotting and doing everything. It would have been nice if there were an incremental approach.

One thing I am on the fence about is indexing with '()' vs '[]'. In Matlab both function calls and indexing use '()' which is a Fortran style (the ambiguity lets you swap functions for matrices to reduce memory use but that's all possible with '[]' in python) which can sometimes be nice. Anyway if you have something like mojo you're wanting to work directly with indices again and I haven't done that in a long time.

Ultimately I don't think anyone would care if mojo and python just play nicely together with minimal friction. (Think: "hey run this mojo code on these numpy blobs"). If I can build GUIs and interact with the OS and parse files and the interact with web in python to prep data while simultaneously crunching in mojo that seems wonderful.

I just hate that Julia requires immediately learning all the dumb crap that doesn't matter to me. Although it's seeming like LLM seem very good at the dumb crap so some sort of LLM translation for the dumb crap could be another option.

In summary: all mojo actually needs is to be better than numba and cython type things with performance that at least matches C++ and Fortran and the GPU libraries. Once that happens then things like the mojo version of pandas will be developed (and will replace things like polars)

Is it really faster than cublas?

evidence?

CUTLASS would like to have a word with you.

I was under the impression that their uptake it slow or non-existant. Am I wrong on that?

I think the only Zig hype I'm seeing is about its compiler and compatibility. Those might well be the same two reasons why you never hear about modula-2.

Comments like this view the ML ecosystem in a vacuum. New ML models are almost never written—all LLMs for example are basically GPT-2 with extremely marginal differences—and the algorithms themselves are the least of the problem in the field. The 30% improvements you get from kernels and compiler tricks are absolutely peanuts compared to the 500%+ improvements you get from upgrading hardware, adding load balancing and routing, KV and prefix caching, optimized collective ops etc. On top of that, the difficulty even just migrating Torch to the C++11 ABI to access fp8 optimizations is nigh insurmountable in large companies.

I say the ship sailed in 2012 because that was around when it was decided to build Tensorflow around legacy data infrastructure at Google rather than developing something new, and the rest of the industry was hamstrung by that decision (along with the baffling declarative syntax of Tensorflow, and the requirement to use Blaze to build it precluding meaningful development outside of Google).

The industry was so desperate to get away from it that they collectively decided that downloading a single giant library with every model definition under the sun baked into it was the de facto solution to loading Torch models for serving, and today I would bet you that easily 90% of deep learning models in production revolve around either TensorRT, or a model being plucked from Huggingface’s giant library.

The decision to halfass machine learning was made a long time ago. A tool like Mojo might work at a place like Apple that works in a vacuum (and is lightyears behind the curve in ML as a result), but it just doesn’t work on Earth.

If there’s anyone that can do it, it’s Lattner, but I don’t think it can be done, because there’s no appetite for it nor is the talent out there. It’s enough of a struggle to get big boy ML engineers at Mag 7 companies to even use Python instead of letting Copilot write them a 500 line bash script. The quality of slop in libraries like sglang and verl is a testament to the futility of trying to reintroduce high quality software back into deep learning.

Any actual reasoning for that claim?

My use case is realtime audio processing (VST plugins).

Metal.jl can be used to write GPU kernels in Julia to target an Apple Silicon GPU. Or you can use KernelAbstractions.jl to write once in a high-level CUDA-like language to target NVIDIA/AMD/Apple/Intel GPUs. For best performance, you'll want to take advantage of vendor-specific hardware, like Tensor Cores in CUDA or Unified Memory on Mac.

You also get an ever-expanding set of Julia GPU libraries. In my experience, these are more focused on the numerical side rather than ML.

If you want to compile an executable for an end user, that functionality was added in Julia 1.12, which hasn't been released yet. Early tests with the release candidate suggest that it works, but I would advise waiting to get a better developer experience.

> The argument against Mojo is that it replaces CUDA (that you get for free with the hardware) with something that you need to license.

You realize that CUDA isn't open source or planned to be open source in the future, right?

Meanwhile parts of Mojo are already open source with the rest expected to be opened up next year.

I really want to like Mojo but you nailed what gives me pause. Not to take an anecdotal example of Polars too far beyond, but I get the sense the current gravity in Python for net new stuff that needs to be written outside Python (obviously a ton of highly performant numpy/scipy/pytorch ecosystem stuff aside) is for it to be written in Rust when necessary.

Not an expert, but though I wouldn't be surprised if Mojo ends up being a better language than Rust for the use case we're discussing, I'm not confident it will ever catch up to Rust in ecosystem and escape velocity as a sane general purpose compiled systems language. It really does feel like Rust has replaced C++ for net new buildouts that would've previously needed its power.

That was originally what swift was meant to be actually.

The Mojo discord and forums are all listed here: https://www.modular.com/community

Not OP, but my guess is GPU MODE. https://discord.gg/gpumode

The only question will there be a benefit in writing your own kernels in something like Mojo than to skip that part altogether and use the primitives with already highly optimized kernels that frameworks like torch provide especially when it comes to performance.

I guess given all the hype people tend to forget why GPGPU is used for, it is like the common memme of why CUDA when there is PyTorch.