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WebGPU support for Halide

Halide has work-in-progress support for generating and running WebGPU shaders. This can be used in conjunction with the WebAssembly backend to bring GPU-accelerated Halide pipelines to the web.

As the first version of the WebGPU standard is itself still being developed, Halide's support has some limitations and may only work with certain browsers and versions of Emscripten.

Known limitations

The following is a non-comprehensive list of known limitations:

  • Only 32-bit integers and floats have efficient support.
    • 8-bit and 16-bit integers are implemented using emulation. Future extensions to WGSL will allow them to be implemented more efficiently.
    • 64-bit integers and floats will likely remain unsupported until WGSL gains extensions to support them.
  • Wrapping native device buffer handles is not yet implemented.
  • You must use CMake/CTest to build/test Halide for WebGPU; using the Makefile is not supported for WebGPU testing (and probably never will be).

In addition to these functional limitations, the performance of the WebGPU backend has not yet been evaluated, and so optimizations in the runtime or device codegen may be required before it becomes profitable to use.

Running with WebAssembly via Emscripten: HL_TARGET=wasm-32-wasmrt-webgpu

Tested with top-of-tree Emscripten as of 2023-02-23, against Chrome v113.

Halide can generate WebGPU code that can be integrated with WASM code using Emscripten.

When invoking emcc to link Halide-generated objects, include these flags: -s USE_WEBGPU=1 -s ASYNCIFY.

Tests that use AOT compilation can be run using a native WebGPU implementation that has Node.js bindings, such as Dawn. You must set an environment variable named HL_WEBGPU_NODE_BINDINGS that has an absolute path to the bindings to run these tests, e.g. HL_WEBGPU_NODE_BINDINGS=/path/to/dawn.node.

See below for instructions on building the Dawn Node.js bindings.

JIT compilation is not supported when using WebGPU with WASM.

Running natively: HL_TARGET=host-webgpu

Tested with top-of-tree Dawn as of 2023-11-27 [commit b5d38fc7dc2a20081312c95e379c4a918df8b7d4].

For testing purposes, Halide can also target native WebGPU libraries, such as Dawn or wgpu. This is currently the only path that can run the JIT correctness tests. See below for instructions on building Dawn.

Note that as of 2023-11-27, wgpu is not supported due to lacking override support for WGSL which we require > in order to set GPU block sizes.

When targeting WebGPU with a native target, Halide defaults to looking for a build of Dawn (with several common names and suffixes); you can override this by setting the HL_WEBGPU_NATIVE_LIB environment variable to the absolute path to the library you want.

Note that it is explicitly legal to define both HL_WEBGPU_NATIVE_LIB and HL_WEBGPU_NODE_BINDINGS at the same time; the correct executable environment will be selected based on the Halide target specified.

Note that it is explicitly legal to specify both WEBGPU_NATIVE_LIB and WEBGPU_NODE_BINDINGS for the same build; the correct executable environment will be selected based on the Halide target specified.

Setting up Dawn

Building Dawn's Node.js bindings currently requires using CMake.

First, install depot_tools and add it to the PATH environment variable.

Next, get Dawn and its dependencies:

# Clone the repo
git clone https://dawn.googlesource.com/dawn
cd dawn

# Bootstrap the gclient configuration with Node.js bindings enabled
cp scripts/standalone-with-node.gclient .gclient

# Fetch external dependencies and toolchains with gclient
gclient sync

# Other dependencies that must be installed manually:
# - golang

Finally, build Dawn, enabling both the Node.js bindings and shared libraries:

mkdir -p <build_dir>
cd <build_dir>

cmake <dawn_root_dir> -G Ninja \
    -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release \
    -DDAWN_BUILD_NODE_BINDINGS=1 \
    -DDAWN_ENABLE_PIC=1 \
    -DBUILD_SHARED_LIBS=ON

ninja dawn.node webgpu_dawn

This will produce the following artifacts:

  • Node.js bindings: <build_dir>/dawn.node
  • Native library: <build_dir>/src/dawn/native/libwebgpu_dawn.{so,dylib,dll}

These paths can then be used for the HL_WEBGPU_NODE_BINDINGS and HL_WEBGPU_NATIVE_LIB environment variables when using Halide.

Updating mini_webgpu.h

The recommended method for updating mini_webgpu.h is to copy the gen/include/dawn/webgpu.h file from the Dawn build directory, then:

  • Restore the // clang-format {off,on} lines.
  • Comment out the #include <std*> lines.
  • Remove the void parameter from the WGPUProc declaration.

This guarantees a version of the WebGPU header that is compatible with Dawn. When the native API eventually stabilizes, it should be possible to obtain a header from the webgpu-native GitHub organization that will be compatible with Dawn, wgpu, and Emscripten.