I'd like to use atomic (rmw) operations from within ldc while targeting nvptx (via dcompute).

The first place to check is dcompute.std.atomic. That's a nice placeholder, but only a placeholder, so I started poking around in ldc and clang. After a modest amount of poking I'm still not sure how to proceed.

If you know of a simple way to bring atomics online for dcompute/nvptx, I'd like to hear from you. Alternatively, if you know why nvptx atomics will be hard to bring online, I'd also like to hear from you.

On a positive note, I've had some success in using dcompute/D's meta programming facilities reworking areal/stencil compute kernels to operate out of "arrays of registers". You meta-unroll til you wrap around the stencil, avoiding moves, and you can use intra-warp shuffles to/from lateral neighbors to minimize load on the memory subsystem when rolling on to the next row.

Another D advantage over CUDA/C++ that can be exploited is nested functions. You can declare variables at the outer function level where they'll pretty much all be mapped to registers (you've got at least 64 per SIMT "lane" to work with, and it's easy to check for spills). You can then access those enregistered variables directly from within the nested functions. Sometimes it's nice not having to pass everything through an argument list.

Thanks again to the ldc/dcompute team for providing the tooling that makes the above possible. And thanks in advance for any guidance on getting atomics up for nvptx.

On Tuesday, 6 April 2021 at 02:23:59 UTC, Bruce Carneal wrote:

Sorry or the late reply. These should all be doable with pragma(LDC_intrinsic, "llvm.nvvm.atomic.*") where * is any of "add", "load.add", etc, I'll try to get a full list. but there is no real difference between this say std.cuda.index

I never implemented them because I didn't need them and my card didn't support them.