The Taichi Programming Language

High-Performance Computing on Spatially Sparse Data Structures

Python Frontend Tutorial

Installation

Supports Ubuntu 14.04/16.04/18.04, ArchLinux, Mac OS X. For GPU support, CUDA 9.0+ is needed.

• Execute python3 -m pip install astpretty astor pytest opencv-python pybind11==2.2.4
• Install taichi with the installation script. Checkout branch llvm.
• (Optional) If you use the experimental LLVM backend, make sure you have LLVM 8 built from scratch, with

mkdir build
cd build
cmake .. -DLLVM_ENABLE_RTTI:BOOL=ON -DBUILD_SHARED_LIBS:BOOL=ON -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release -DLLVM_TARGETS_TO_BUILD="X86;NVPTX" -DLLVM_ENABLE_ASSERTIONS=ON
make -j 8
sudo make install

• Execute ti install https://github.com/yuanming-hu/taichi_lang to install the DSL project
• Add the following line to your ~/.bashrc or ~/.zshrc for the python frontend.

export PYTHONPATH=$TAICHI_REPO_DIR/projects/taichi_lang/python:$PYTHONPATH

• Execute source ~/.bashrc (or source ~/.zshrc) to reload shell config.
• Execute ti test to run all the tests. It may take a around 20 minutes to run all tests.
• Check out examples for runnable examples. Run them with python3.

Folder Structure

Key folders are

• examples : example programs written in Taichi
  • cpp: benchmarking examples in the SIGGRAPH Asia paper (mpm_benchmark.cpp, smoke_renderer.cpp, cnn.cpp)
  • fem: the FEM benchmark
• include: language runtime
• src: the compiler implementation (The functionality is briefly documented in each file)
  • analysis: static analysis passes
  • backends: codegen to x86 and CUDA
  • transforms: IR transform passes
  • ir: the intermediate representation system
  • program: the context for taichi programs
  • ...
• test: unit tests

Troubleshooting

• Run with debug mode to see if there's any illegal memory access;
• Disable compiler optimizations to quickly confirm that the issue is not cause by optimization;

Bibtex

@inproceedings{hu2019taichi,
  title={Taichi: A Language for High-Performance Computation on Spatially Sparse Data Structures},
  author={Hu, Yuanming and Li, Tzu-Mao and Anderson, Luke and Ragan-Kelley, Jonathan and Durand, Fr\'edo},
  booktitle={SIGGRAPH Asia 2019 Technical Papers},
  pages={201},
  year={2019},
  organization={ACM}
}