GPotion: Embedding GPU programming in Elixir

Abstract

This paper describes GPotion, a DSL for GPU programming embedded in the Elixir functional language. GPotion allows programmers to write low-level GPU kernels, similar to CUDA kernels, in Elixir but also provides high-level facilities, like garbage collection of host and device arrays allocated in the host, type inference and simplified data transfer. This paper describes the design and implementation of GPotion and also presents experiments that demonstrate that GPotion allows fast and efficient kernels with little overhead in comparison to pure CUDA. GPotion is implemented using metaprogramming features of Elixir, without having to modify Elixir’s compiler. The source code for GPotion and the benchmarks used in the experiments are available in a GitHub repository.