Rate my startup: GPU.NET - GPU computing on .NET, from TidePowerd

24 pointsby profquail15 anni fa9 comments

Hi HN! We've just announced v2.0 of our MVP ("GPU.NET"), which aims to make GPU computing as simple and easy as possible by allowing you to write GPU-accelerated code in C#. Think of us as the managed equivalent of CUDA or OpenCL.

Our target market consists of two major segments: industries/companies who write a lot of numerical or computationally-intensive code in C#, as well as those currently writing GPU-based code in CUDA or OpenCL who may want a better way to integrate with .NET.

Any constructive feedback you'd like to offer (related to either GPU.NET or our business model) will be much appreciated.

We're also looking for interesting new example projects; if you put together a cool project, submit a pull request to us on GitHub (or alternately, email us at [email protected]).

Check out our existing example projects at http://github.com/tidepowerd/GPU.NET-Example-Projects

Thanks! -Jack

http://www.tidepowerd.com

2 comments

guybrush015 anni fa

Linkfied versions of the above: http://github.com/tidepowerd/GPU.NET-Example-Projects http://www.tidepowerd.com

terryww15 anni fa

who writes computationally intensive code in c#? on what market research is this based on? also does it run on linux? i'm asking because in hpc some prototyping is done on win pcs, production code is almost always on linux nodes. so, why .net?

profquail15 anni fa

From what we've seen so far (early users and people we've met at conferences, etc.) there are a fair number of enterprises who write their numerical code in C# so that it's easy for them to maintain, integrate with the other applications, and so on.

It's designed to run on Linux (via Mono), but I need to fix one or two minor bugs and create installers for Linux and Mac OSX. I'm aiming to get this stuff done within the next couple of weeks. The upside here is that you'll be able to create single, GPU-accelerated binaries which you can "xcopy-deploy" to Windows, Linux, and Mac clients.

Genbox15 anni fa

I've built a physics engine in C# called Farseer Physics Engine. Believe it or not, but it is acutally faster than the original C++ code it is based on. I did a benchmark on physics engines (based on Box2d) in Java, C# and C++: http://ianqvist.blogspot.com/2010/12/benchmarking-box2d-base...

th0ma515 anni fa

so... you rewrote something and it's now faster? i applaud the outcome, but i'm not sure it necessarily implies that the VM is better than other VMs or native...

profquail15 anni fa

It is interesting, if only because I've heard a lot of talk from C/C++ developers who believe that by compiling to native code their programs will always be faster than the equivalent C# code running on the .NET CLR. It's nice to have some data points to debunk that theory.

th0ma515 anni fa

I've always heard that VMs can do JIT optimization that may be hard to get to with native, and for the most part I've never heard of the .NET CLR being any better than any other, except for perhaps the LLVM which is better, for reasons specific to it.

[deleted]15 anni fa

gaius15 anni fa

Hedge funds.

profquail15 anni fa

This. Monte Carlo simulations are widely used in finance and as they're "embarrassingly parallel" we see fantastic speedups when porting them to the GPU. I've seen gains up to 200x on a single board when running in single precision (and about half that in double-precision) -- and you can cram 6 or 8 GPUs in a single workstation or server.