PyStream: Python Shaders Running on the GPU

Abstract

Abstract Graphics processing units (GPUs) have tremendous computing power, but are hard to program. Most GPU programming languages are extremely low level; no one has run a general-purpose high-level language on a GPU. This dissertation shows how to run Python shaders on a GPU for real-time rendering. Shaders written in Python run 30,000 - 300,000 times faster than on a CPU. This is partly because GPUs are designed to run shaders and partly because of the design of PyStream, a Python compiler for the GPU. PyStream advances the state-of-the-art in pointer analysis for Python, eliminates abstraction overhead for Python, maps a language with references onto an architecture that does not support references, and uses a single code base to program both the CPU and GPU. PyStream points the way for running high-level languages on specialized architectures.