Adrian Paskert - AcoDyn: fluid dynamics on the GPU powered by Rust

Recording of a talk given at the Scientific Computing in Rust 2024 online workshop.
In this talk I would like to talk about the fluid dynamics software AcoDyn, which I have been developing for the past two years, first for my Master thesis, and now for my PhD. By tapping into the potential of GPUs for massively parallel workloads I was able to increase the performance of the software over previous solutions by a significant margin. The talk will focus on how Rust as the main programming language for the project contributed greatly to the design process and the state of GPU programming with Rust.

[@xnadave]

Great presentation.

[@johanngambolputty5351]

Why not OpenCL for GPU?

[@xnadave]

OpenCL is effectively dead. NVIDIA never cared about it and AMD deprecated it years ago. You'd be better off writing a compute shader in Vk or GL. The only major player still actively working on OpenCL is Intel, and they're not exactly doing great.

[@johanngambolputty5351]

@@xnadave I mean, I'm going to continue using it so long as there's drivers, I found it easier to get my head around when I was first getting into GPGPU, maybe I'll give CUDA another go, but I also like the idea of a cross-vendor technology more. I know you can translate CUDA/HIP but there's just fewer steps involved if its a shared standard to begin with. I don't like the OpenGL domain specific syntax and I hear vk is worse, OpenCl is a lot closer to writing code for a cpu thread pool, which makes it so much of a smaller jump from cpu programming.