github.com/greensucculent/metal

metal is a library for running computational tasks (GPGPU) on Apple silicon through Apple's Metal API.

Overview

Apple's Metal API is a unified framework for performing various types of task on Apple silicon GPUs. It offers low-level, direct, detailed access to the hardware (hence, metal) for fast and efficient processing.

The processing centers around pipelines, which consist of a function to run and an arbitrary number of buffers. The metal function is parsed into a series of operations, and the buffers of data are streamed through it in SIMD groups. (For more details on SIMD groups and best practices for writing metal functions using them, see Apple's documentation on threads and threadgroups.)

This library leverages the Metal API to run computational processes in a distributed, parallel method. First, a metal function is parsed, added to a pipeline, and cached. This happens once for every metal function. Then, any number of metal buffers are created. A metal buffer is an array of arbitrary length that references items of an arbitrary type. The actual type is defined in the metal function's definition. Finally, the metal function is run with the metal buffers. This streams the data in the buffers through the computational operation(s) as sequenced in the metal function.

For the full documentation, see https://pkg.go.dev/github.com%2Fgreensucculent%2Fmetal?GOOS=darwin.