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GPGPU acceleration?

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Billy:
I know it's pain to get working, but a simulation with many bots seems like an ideal problem for opencl or similar. One job for each bot, and perhaps even grouping similar bots into warps for SIMD execution on Nvidia chips. You wouldn't necessarily have to move much data between main memory and GPU memory if you don't need to observe the simulation in real time.

I've only dabbled with GPU programming though (circle detection in images), so maybe it's not as well suited as it seems. I am aware that it would take a lot of effort to port all of the DB simulation code to opencl, what with the physics, DNA interpretation, reproduction mutation... Maybe I'll try making something similar from scratch over the summer, specifically geared towards GPGPU execution.

Numsgil:
Executing the DNA isn't really well suited for GPUs, unfortunately, since each bot has to run its own DNA on its own data.  Getting the physics to execute on GPUs is possible in principle but rarely done in practice.  Probably only shots are really suited for GPU calculations, but we just don't have enough shots in a typical sim to outweigh the upfront CPU cost of transferring things to/from the GPU.

Billy:
Couldn't kernels read tokenised DNA code from one buffer, memlocs from another, and interpret the DNA? Writing the new memloc values to a third buffer, perhaps. There is a lot of branching, which would reduce the benefit from SIMD processors, but maybe this could be reduced by grouping similar bots. Most bots spend the vast majority of their time doing one thing, from my experience (at least in evosims), like searching or spinning, so this might just work.

Numsgil:
Problem is GPUs only benefit when they can do the same operation (add, multiply, etc.) in parallel.  Even if you put the DNA on the GPUs somehow, you still can't execute more than one DNA program at a time.

It's a problem of SIMD vs. MIMD.  GPUs need SIMD to overcome the additional cost of transferring the data to/from the GPU and starting up a processing batch, but most of Darwinbots is either SISD or MIMD.  The DNA execution is MIMD, certainly.  The physics has passes of MIMD but then everything bottlenecks in places through a SISD section.  In that sort of problem, CPUs are still king.

Botsareus:
We need better designed hardware is what we need.  :P

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