Training-day instructions

Expectations and conventions

Welcome to this practical about high-performance GPU computing in Rust!

This course is meant to follow the previous one, which is about CPU computing. It is assumed that you have followed that course, and therefore we will not repeat anything that was said there. However, if your memory is hazy and you are unsure about what a particular construct in the Rust code examples does, please ping the teacher for guidance.

Although some familiarity with Rust CPU programming is assumed, no particular GPU programming knowledge is expected beyond basic knowledge of GPU hardware architecture. Indeed, the GPU API that we will use (Vulkan) is different enough from other (CUDA- or OpenMP-like) APIs that are more commonly used in HPC that knowledge of those APIs may cause extra confusion. The course’s introduction explains why we are using Vulkan and not these other APIs like everyone else.

Exercises source code

At the time where you registered, you should have been directed to instructions for setting up your development environment. If you did not follow these instructions yet, this is the right time!

Now that the course has begun, we will download a up-to-date copy of the exercises’ source code and unpack it somewhere inside of your development environement. This will create a subdirectory called exercises/ in which we will be working during the rest of the course.

Please pick your environement below in order to get appropriate instructions:

cd ~
# Can't use rm -rf exercises because we must keep the bind mount alive
for f in $(ls -A exercises); do rm -rf exercises/$f; done  \
&& curl -LO https://numerical-rust-gpu-96deb7.pages.in2p3.fr/setup/exercises.zip  \
&& unzip -u exercises.zip  \
&& rm exercises.zip  \
&& cd exercises

Invoke-Command -ScriptBlock {
      $ErrorActionPreference="Stop"
      if (Test-Path exercises) {
            throw "ERROR: Please move or delete the existing 'exercises' subdirectory"
      }
      Invoke-WebRequest https://numerical-rust-cpu-96deb7.pages.in2p3.fr/setup/exercises.zip  `
                        -OutFile exercises.zip
      Expand-Archive exercises.zip -DestinationPath .
      Remove-Item exercises.zip
      Set-Location exercises
}

if [ -e exercises ]; then
    echo "ERROR: Please move or delete the existing 'exercises' subdirectory"
else
    curl -LO https://numerical-rust-gpu-96deb7.pages.in2p3.fr/setup/exercises.zip  \
    && unzip exercises.zip  \
    && rm exercises.zip  \
    && cd exercises
fi

General advice

Some exercises are based on code examples that are purposely incorrect. Therefore, if some code fails to build, it may not come from a mistake of the course author, but from some missing work on your side. The course material should explicitly point out when that is the case.

If you encounter any failure which does not seem expected, or if you otherwise get stuck, please call the trainer for guidance!

With that being said, let’s get started with actual Rust code. You can move to the next page, or any other page within the course for that matter, through the following means:

• Left and right keyboard arrow keys will switch to the previous/next page. Equivalently, arrow buttons will be displayed at the end of each page, doing the same thing.
• There is a menu on the left (not shown by default on small screen, use the top-left button to show it) that allows you to quickly jump to any page of the course. Note, however, that the course material is designed to be read in order.
• With the magnifying glass icon in the top-left corner, or the “S” keyboard shortcut, you can open a search bar that lets you look up content by keywords.

1. If you’re using rust_code_server, this means using the terminal pane of the web-based VSCode editor. ↩

2. That would be a regular shell for a local Linux/macOS installation and a Windows Subsystem for Linux shell for WSL. ↩