The first traces of Moore Threads’ GPU programming software stack, dubbed MUSA, have surfaced online, furthering the nation’s pursuit of tech-autarky. MUSA serves as an alternative to Nvidia’s CUDA environment, compatible with the domestic MUSA MTT GPU lineup. Any open-source pedigree of the SDK has not been mentioned, so it is likely proprietary and won’t be of much benefit to developers outside China.
The U.S. has implemented a series of export restrictions on China, including: advanced AI chips, high-bandwidth memory (HBM), manufacturing equipment, and silicon wafers from leading players like Intel, TSMC, and Samsung. In a bid to reduce reliance on Western hardware, China is hard at work developing its semiconductor ecosystem with in-house silicon, fab equipment, memory, CPUs, and even GPUs. The latter is of great importance, as modern-day machine learning (sometimes under the buzzword banner of AI) is largely accelerated by parallel computing, something which GPUs excel at.
A strong GPU programming ecosystem offers high-level abstraction, ready-to-use libraries, documentation, and profiling tools. With high-performance Nvidia GPU exports still in limbo, Moore Threads is offering an alternative to CUDA.
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MUSA provides a built-in compiler (MCC), runtime libraries (MUSA Runtime), a comprehensive list of specialized libraries (MUSA-X), debuggers, and profilers. To ensure compatibility with already written CUDA code, the MUSA SDK also includes Musify, a tool that translates CUDA code for the MUSA environment, likely by translating PTX code at runtime, similar to zLUDA.