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# System prepended metadata

title: Rust ML WG Meeting 00005

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# Rust ML WG Meeting 00005

## Meeting Info

Date: 20200623

Start time: 1600ET

Zoom (Meeting ID: 940 7467 1258)

* link: https://mozilla.zoom.us/j/94074671258


## Agenda
- Discuss collaborative library for doing `ndarray`-based convolution
    - Seems like an extremely common use-case that most people would probably otherwise need to re-implement from scratch
    - [`ocl-convolution`](https://github.com/slowli/ocl-convolution) does this with OpenCL-accelerated code, although examples for CPU-only aren't great

- Updates on individual approaches and any new libraries
    - Has anyone looked at the `autograd` crate? It's pretty impressive, although the examples aren't completely working at the moment (bug report has been filed)


## Participants
- Chris M
- Geordan Worley
- Jonathan Woolet-Light
- Tiberio Ferreira
- Alex H


## Minutes
- Discussion about approaches for doing computation on GPU
    - Low-level w/Vulkan vs higher-level OpenCL
    - Pre-allocating space for all operations ahead of time can lead to benefits
    - Generally, the overhead between passing information between GPU and CPU is fairly high
    - cuBLAS and cuDNN performance considerations, with the work being done on `accel`

- Discussion of high-level vs. low-level GPU API for linear algebra vs custom code approaches
    - JWL is using Vulkan
    - Performance differences between WebGPU and Vulkan based on command buffer allocation? 

- Saw autograd crate, which is a little more similar to Tensorflow

- Interest in MKL operations and BLAS
    - `ndarray` already has mkl (?)

- Comments on cross-platform opportunities on WebGPU, but lack of documentation makes it a difficult consideration

- TbF's library with matrix multiplication, which can move into new shaders
    - https://github.com/tiberiusferreira/gpu_compute

- Geordan has some existing convolutional work in the `mli` library


## Actions
- Check if WebGPU supports command buffers
    - Tiberio will take a look
- Benchmarks for estimating performance between GPU/BLAS linear algebra libraries
- JWL requests some more eyes on his Vulkan issue at https://github.com/vulkano-rs/vulkano/issues/1389 