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Rootbeer GPU Compiler Lets Almost Any Java Code Run On the GPU

Posted by timothy on from the also-it's-delicious dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Today the source code to the Rootbeer GPU Compiler was released as open source on github. This work allows for a developer to use almost any Java code on the GPU. It is free, open source and highly tested. Rootbeer is the most full featured translator to convert Java Bytecode to CUDA. It allows arbitrary graphs of objects to be serialized to the GPU and the GPU kernel to be written in Java." Rootbeer is the work of Syracuse University instructor Phil Pratt-Szeliga.

3 of 304 comments (clear)

  1. Re:How about getting java code to run on java by SplashMyBandit · · Score: 5, Interesting

    This is simply not true for code written by a professional and competent Java developer (note: part of my consulting gig means I code Java on a professional basis).

    If you write only to the public APIs then Java truly is Write-Once-Run-Anywhere (although some bad Java developers use internal functionality that can change between Java versions - I'm guessing that perhaps these folks are used to coding to the Undocumented APIs of Win32 that you used to have to use to get things done). In Java you shouldn't do this. IIRC, Sun created around ten thousand unit tests to ensure Java worked correctly on each platform (wonderful, they did all the porting and port testing effort so Java developers don't have to).

    Aside from my professional coding (where Java written on a Mac works flawlessly when deployed to Linux and Windows servers) in my spare time I'm working on modern jet air combat simulator in Java. The same Java+JoGL code works flawlessly on Mac, Linux and Windows. Any differences are in capabilities/performance of individual graphics cards (AMD/ATI vs NVidia).

    This article about being able to write Java for the GPU is very interesting, since writing shaders via OpenGL is a little bit of a PITA (there is an impedance mismatch between the conventions of Java, OpenGL and GLSL - it would be fabulous to just write in Java [akin to how I can do this on the Web using Google Web Toolkit]).

    So I don't think your statement is really true - except for buggy software written by developers who have bad simple-platform habits.

  2. Blah its CUDA by zixxt · · Score: 5, Interesting

    It's CUDA only, meaning it does not support any open standards. Call me when when I can target OpenCL.

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    1. Re:Blah its CUDA by SecondaryOak · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Are you positive it's CUDA only? Browsing the code it does seem to have an OpenCL "backend", at https://github.com/pcpratts/rootbeer1/tree/master/src/edu/syr/pcpratts/rootbeer/generate/opencl