08-28, 10:30–11:15 (Europe/Berlin), Room 5
OpenGL is old and on a path to being deprecated. Modern GPU API's like Vulkan and Metal solve most problems that plague OpenGL, and higher abstractions like wgpu / WebGPU provide a modern interface to control GPU hardware. The way that these work is much more pleasant to work with, and also provides performance benefits, especially for Python.
I'll talk about the problems that plague OpenGL, and how modern API's like Vulkan, Metal, and DirectX12 solve these. Since these API's are still very low level, we need abstractions to provide a friendlier API. The most promising abstraction is WebGPU, which also comes with a corresponding C-API (webgpu.h). The wgpu-py library provides a Python wrapper.
This talk is for anyone who wants to learn more about the current state of GPU API's and/or is interested in wgpu / WebGPU. I'll briefly discuss the GPU programming model, but a basic understanding of GPU's is assumed.
Apart from obvious applications in graphics and visualization, there are also opportunities to use wgpu for compute tasks, i.e. as an alternative to Cuda.
I'll keep the talk relatively short, so we have plenty of time for questions and discussions.
expert
Abstract as a tweet –maintainers track session on visualization and graphics
Category [Data Science and Visualization] –Data Visualization
Expected audience expertise: Domain –expert
Almar Klein is an independent Python developer, active in the open source community since 2007. He has worked on various open source libraries, and has a special interest in (3D) visualization.