"It's Just One Ocean" -Crutcher
Tapestry is an experimental tensor expression compiler framework.
Modern GPU-filled datacenters contain thousands of nodes with 8+ GPUs each, and are capable of performing trillions of floating point operations per second. The goal of Tapestry is to unlock the full potential of modern GPU-filled datacenters, by providing a foundational programming environment for scalable, optimized, massively multi-GPU tensor programs.
Tensor programs underlie all deep-network based AI, and all finite element numerical simulations. These include numerical weather and fluid simulations, protein folding and drug discovery simulations, quantum chemistry simulations, financial simulations, and material design and manufacturing simulations. Modern tensor programming environments are designed to maximize productivity of developers working on single-GPU workstations, and struggle to express programs which can be scheduled across even a few GPUs. Some of these frameworks do have solutions to scaling up limited workloads, but no general-purpose solutions exist for scaling up arbitrary tensor programs.
Multiple existing companies operate with >$1B/year annual hardware budgets for these simulations, somewhere in the dozens of $B/year are being spent worldwide on these calculations today.
Though it is difficult to predict in advance the speedups of a new optimizing compiler, it is the case that, due to the semantics of their programming models, the vast majority of existing tensor applications are run with no meaningful structural optimizations; the programs are run directly as human engineers have written them, with no further optimizations. This is akin to directly executing a SQL query without any query planner or optimizer. The potential wins in efficiency for existing applications from an optimizing compiler are therefore large; conservatively in the 30% range; but for some applications, the potential is dramatically larger.
Irrespective of efficiency wins, the potential for new applications is tremendous; existing applications are limited by the interconnect scheduling and manual design of the programs, and removing these limitations will enable new applications which are not possible today.
At the current time, Tapestry is sitting upon years of development towards a solid theoretical foundation, of shardable, composable, and re-writable polyhedral model tensor block algebra operation expressions on an extensible compiler framework. The work is focused on exploiting this mathematical foundation towards a practical compiler suite. Expectations are that the project needs 1-3 aggregate engineer-years of work to reach a state where it can be used to compile real-world applications.
This is a big-pull project; the payoffs are huge, but the work required to climb from theory back to practical parity with existing frameworks is substantial. There are many opportunities for development applications along the way, empowered by that solid theoretical foundation. We are seeking contributors, reviewers, and enthusiasts to help bring this project to life sooner. Funding support, or safe-harbor in a larger organization, would also be very helpful.
The full Tapestry Documentation provides much more detailed information about the project's motivation, goals, design, and implementation.
If you have any interest in the project, please join the Discord server. We are actively looking for reviewers, contributors, fans, theorists, and developers and would love to have you involved.
A huge portion of bringing this project to life is building a community of enthusiasts and experts who can help guide the project, not only through theory and code; but also through iterative development of the documentation, making the project accessible to wider audiences.
We are particularly interested in:
- document reviewers
- project managers
- programmers
- compiler theorists
We are actively looking for feedback on the project. If you have any issues, please file a bug on the Issues page.
If you have longer-form concerns to discuss, please post them in the project Discussions board.
If you are interested in running the existing test suites, or contributing code, you'll need to clone the repository and setup the development environment.
The project is a JDK 21 multi-module Maven/Java project, and should be setup in any modern development IDE (JetBrains, VSC, etc).
That said, the project has been developed by one person thus far, and may have some missing dependencies or undocumented requirements. If you run into any issues, please join the Discord or file a bug (or both!) with as much information as possible, and I'll prioritize fixing the cause or documenting the missing dependency.