Rootbeer

The Rootbeer GPU Compiler makes it easy to use Graphics Processing Units from within Java.

Rootbeer is more advanced than CUDA or OpenCL Java Language Bindings. With bindings the developer must serialize complex graphs of objects into arrays of primitive types. With Rootbeer this is done automatically. Also with language bindings, the developer must write the GPU kernel in CUDA or OpenCL. With Rootbeer a static analysis of the Java Bytecode is done (using Soot) and CUDA code is automatically generated.

See doc/hpcc_rootbeer.pdf for the conference slides from HPCC-2012. See doc/rootbeer1_paper.pdf for the conference paper from HPCC-2012.

Rootbeer is licensed under the MIT license.

Development notes

Rootbeer was created using Test Driven Development and testing is essentially important in Rootbeer. Rootbeer is 20k lines of product code and 8.8k of test code and 48/58 tests currently pass on Windows, Linux and Mac. The Rootbeer test case suite covers every aspect of the Java Programming language except:

1. native methods
2. reflection
3. dynamic method invocation
4. sleeping while inside a monitor.

The original publication for Rootbeer was in HPCC-2012.
"Rootbeer: Seamlessly using GPUs from Java"
Philip C. Pratt-Szeliga, James W. Fawcett, Roy D. Welch.
HPCC-2012.

This work is supported by the National Science Foundation grant number MCB-0746066 to R.D.W. and God is Most High.

Work is on-going to improve performance with Rootbeer. Currently Rootbeer has competative speed when using single-dimensional arrays of primitive types.

Building

1. Clone the github repo to rootbeer1/
2. cd rootbeer1/
3. ant jar
4. ./pack-rootbeer (linux) or ./pack-rootbeer.bat (windows)
5. Use the rootbeer1/Rootbeer.jar (not dist/Rootbeer1.jar)

Pre-Built Binaries

See here: http://rbcompiler.com/download.html

CUDA Setup

You need to have the CUDA Toolkit and CUDA Driver installed to use Rootbeer. Download it from http://www.nvidia.com/content/cuda/cuda-downloads.html

API

See the following links for help on the API:

1. http://rbcompiler.com/
2. http://rbcompiler.com/features.html
3. https://github.com/pcpratts/rootbeer1/tree/develop/gtc2013/Matrix

About

Rootbeer is written by:

Phil Pratt-Szeliga
Syracuse University
pcpratts@trifort.org
http://trifort.org/
http://rbcompiler.com/