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Open-Source GPU Used For Research (binghamton.edu)

Posted by Soulskill on from the strong-progress dept.

Theovon writes: For quite some time now, "open hardware" enthusiasts have had access to a number of open source CPUs, including OpenRISC. However, it wasn't until recently that there has been any kind of open source GPU. In 2014, the Vertical Research Group at the University of Wisconsin-Madison announced MIAOW. MIAOW is in many ways a clone of the AMD Southern Islands architecture and can even run some of the same binary code. Unfortunately, MIAOW is missing some key components such as video and memory systems, making it not currently possible to implement fully in hardware. For this, Nyuzi comes to the rescue. Nyuzi (formerly Nyami) has been in development since 2010 and is a fully functional open source GPU inspired by Larrabee. Although architecturally different from the SIMT architectures from AMD and Nvidia, researchers at Binghamton University and several other places have already used it to conduct research on GPUs. A paper (PDF) was published in March 2015 about this processor (one of the authors was the original founder of the Open Graphics Project), and Nyuzi (homepage) can be downloaded from GitHub.

3 of 28 comments (clear)

  1. What a misleading article. by BarbaraHudson · · Score: 2, Informative

    If you go to the web site and actually read the article, you'll see that there's no hardware - it's just a "synthesizable gpu architectural model that you can download from github". This is just about modeling a gpu architecture, and seeing how the simulated model can be improved. Considering the cost of fabbing a one-off piece of silicon, ...

    The paper, "Nyami: A Synthesizable GPU Architectural Model for General-Purpose and Graphics-Specific Workloads" appeared in International Symposium on Performance Analysis of Systems and Software

    Now you know why there are no pictures. "Pics or it didn't happen" :-)

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    "Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
    1. Re:What a misleading article. by Caelius · · Score: 3, Informative

      They ran this on an FPGA, does that not count as hardware? Or do you want to go to all of the open-source hardware communities and tell them what they do is not actually open-source hardware?

  2. More info, pics, youtube, about Nyami/Nyuzi by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    I googled this and found this from an OGML discussion going on about this GPU. There are some screenshots and even a youtube video.

    Since 2010, Jeff Bush (github, blog) has been working on an Apache-licensed open source GPU (github, home page, wiki), and he has a few other interesting github projects as well (link, link, link). The Nyuzi Processor is a fully functional GPU. It is written in synthesizable Verilog, has a functional compiler toolchain, and comes with test suites, benchmarks, the software component of 3D rendering engine, and more. Its development has been gaining momentum in discussions (link, link, Google Group) and coding projects (gsoc). It has been implemented on an Altera FPGA, and there are some videos online of it animating a rotating teapot and a Phong-shaded torus, along with the results of recently-added mipmap support. Recently, Jeff Bush got together with the founder of the Open Graphics Project, and they co-wrote a peer-reviewed publication about this GPU and some experiments they did, which was recently presented at a well-respected academic CS conference (ISPASS). Although its developer and other hobbyists are doing this for fun, academics and engineers who specialize in GPU architecture are already showing interest in using Nyuzi for their own research (e.g. link, link), which gives them finally an open platform to estimate not just cycle count but also clock frequency, energy, and circuit area effects of GPU design experiments.