> Cross-vendor GPU support: A single codebase runs on AMD, NVIDIA, and CPU via KernelAbstractions.jl

This is why I wish Julia were the language for ML and sci comp in general, but Python is sucking all of the air out of the room.

As an aside, it is really interesting to see a computational package that, while supporting multiple GPU vendors, was first vetted on AMD, not NVidia. It is encouraging to see ROCM finally shaking off its reputation for poor support.

The molecule and MD trajectory renders look great and an easy API! I have been doing this in rust, but it's a full program vs something scriptable like this. The images and animations on this page also look a hell of a lot better than what I cobbled together in WGPU.

Is the material description part of the language the same as in PBRT?

I'm asking because I had a lot of trouble trying to describe interfaces between materials, only to find out that what I wanted to do was not possible in PBRT without modifying the code. Apparently, in PBRT a material can only have one other material touching it. So, for example rendering a glass filled with water and ice is not possible without hacks. From a user's point of view this is a bit of a let-down, of course.

Context: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45668543

I don't hear nearly as much about Julia as I used to. A few years ago the view was that it was about to replace Python as the language of choice for data science. Seems like that didn't happen?

It's says:

>the reference implementation from Physically Based Rendering (Pharr, Jakob, Humphreys)

I'd like to know a little about the process you went through for the port. That book * sounds like an excellent resource to start from but what was it like using it and the code?

* https://pbrt.org/

That's an impressive accomplishment and a fantastic tool to explore.

honestly the AMD-first bit surprised me - usually ROCm support is an afterthought or just broken outright.

curious about BVH traversal specifically. dynamic dispatch patterns across GPU backends can get weird fast. did KernelAbstractions hold up there or were there vendor-specific fallbacks needed for the heavier acceleration structure work?

On iOS Safari the videos are fullscreening themselves as I scroll. I've seen this on other blogs before but I don't know what causes it. Super annoying

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