Re: Have GPGPU support in guix?

[Joshua Branson <jbranso@fastmail.com>]

Fis Trivial <ybbs.daans@hotmail.com> writes:

> Hi Guixs, this is actually a feature wish.
>
> I tried to use guix to manage many of my softwares on my system, but
> some dependencies are missing which is blocking a full transition to
> Guix based system and development environment. Most notably is GPU
> computing support.
>
> My daily routine is doing machine learning, which requires GPU for
> computing nowadays. Currently I need to use CUDA from NVidia, as many of
> you might know, it's not free software, not even an open source
> software. However, it's the de fato toolchain in deep learning
> community, so basically it's a must have dependency for most of the
> related libraries if you want decent performance. Time passes and
> hardwork have been done, now we have some libraries ported to OpenCL or
> HIP (from AMD), it's not mature yet but I think we have a pretty good
> shot at working them out in near future.

Since this is a GNU endorsed distro, guixSD will never have an official
way to install or use CUDA.  There might eventually be an unofficial way
to install it someday via a guile potlock (or is it the guild command).
But I wouldn't recommend using it.  No one will seriously test it or
ensure that it works well.

>
> However, I wanted to manage all of these with guix so that we can have a
> unified dependency tree. Currently there are a few options for OpenCL
> runtime. Namely, beignet, neo from Intel, ROCm stack from AMD, the POCL
> project and the implementation in mesa.

This is probably doable.

>
> I tried to package beignet (an old OpenCL runtime from Intel) but it
> wasn't successful due to failed tests (it failed from recognizing
> device).
> https://github.com/trivialfis/guixpkgs/blob/master/opencl.scm
>
> To support GPU computing, we need a full stack of softwares, from kernel
> to user space libraries. When it comes to low level part I got have
> litte to no knowledge, so I am hoping someone here can provide some
> help/insight for having GPU computing libraries in Guix.
>
> Thanks.