Hardware Acceleration WG, meeting #13

[vmayoral]

Hey all,

I’m happy to call for the 13th Hardware Acceleration Working Group meeting (LinkedIn event) to be held on 2022-12-13T16:00:00Z (your browser’s time). In case you missed past meetings, here’s the ROS 2 Hardware Acceleration Working Group list with past recordings the WG is keeping. As for other working group resources, find them below or in the WG community repo:

ROS 2 Hardware Acceleration Working Group (HAWG) resources

• Objective: Drive creation, maintenance and testing of acceleration kernels on top of open standards (C++ and OpenCL) for optimized ROS 2 and Gazebo interactions over different compute substrates (including FPGAs, GPUs and ASICs).
• Reference hardware platform: Kria K26 Adaptive SOM
• Meetings invite group: ROS 2 Hardware Acceleration WG Google Group
• Instant messaging: Matrix community (Matrix is an open network for secure, decentralized communication).
• Backlog management: https://github.com/ros-acceleration/community/projects/1
• Github organization: ros-acceleration
• Meeting minutes: HAWG minutes
• Discourse tag: wg-acceleration
• Previous meetings:
  • ROS 2 Hardware Accelerating WG, meeting #1
  • ROS 2 Hardware Acceleration WG, meeting #2
  • ROS 2 Hardware Acceleration WG, meeting #3
  • ROS 2 Hardware Acceleration WG, meeting #4
  • ROS 2 Hardware Acceleration WG, meeting #5
  • ROS 2 Hardware Acceleration WG, meeting #6
  • ROS 2 Hardware Acceleration WG, meeting #7
  • ROS 2 Hardware Acceleration WG, meeting #8
  • ROS 2 Hardware Acceleration WG, meeting #9
  • ROS 2 Hardware Acceleration WG, meeting #10
  • ROS 2 Hardware Acceleration WG, meeting #11
  • ROS 2 Hardware Acceleration WG, meeting #12

In this meeting we will touch on two topics we didn’t expand last time: a) Updates on the Robotic Processing Unit and Robotics MCU projects and b) discussion around REP-2014 and RobotPerf including the recent community discussion and other updates on hardware acceleration. The session will also include a guest talk provided by Piotr Rybicki from Robotec.ai. He’ll be telling us about his recent work around the RobotecGPULidar, a cross-platform (Windows and Linux), C/C++ library for simulating LiDARs on CUDA-enabled GPUs, accelerated by RTX cores if available.

The meeting is scheduled to be 60 minutes. Coordinates for the meeting below:

• Time: 2022-12-13T16:00:00Z
• Duration: 60 minutes
• Coordinates: https://meet.google.com/wns-ihie-mzc
  • LinkedIn event
• Preliminary agenda:
  1. Welcome
  2. Old business and progress review
     • 2.1 Updates on the Robotic Processing Unit and Robotics MCU projects
     • 2.2 discussion on REP-2008, Q&A and vote for draft status (announcement)
     • 2.3 discussion around REP-2014 feedback and RobotPerf including the recent community discussion
     • 2.4 other updates
  3. New business
     • 3.1 None planned
  4. Guest talk: Piotr Rybicki, RobotecGPULidar, a cross-platform (Windows and Linux), C/C++ library for simulating LiDARs on CUDA-enabled GPUs, accelerated by RTX cores if available.
  5. Q&A

[vmayoral]

Updated the agenda above. Added REP 2008 final review and draft vote - ROS 2 Hardware acceleration architecture and conventions - ROS General - Open Robotics Discourse.

[vmayoral]

Come join us this afternoon to discuss updates on RobotPerf (see RobotPerf benchmarks, the benchmarking suite to evaluate robotics computing performance using ROS 2 - ROS General - Open Robotics Discourse) and more.

[vmayoral]

Thanks all for a good meeting yesterday.

00:00 Welcome
01:23 Updated Robotic Processing Unit (RPU) mechanical design
03:27 Updates on Robotics MCU project
07:57 RobotPerf, benchmarking suite to evaluate robotics computing performance
14:25 Standardization effort updates
32:50 REP 2008 vote result
33:33 Guest talk: RobotecGPULidar, Adam Dabrowski
49:13 Q&A

Minutes | LinkedIn event

Meeting polls

Conducted to pick the opinion of the WG on some of the previous discussions at:

• Proposal for ROS 2 Hardware Acceleration Working Group (HAWG)
• REP-2008 RFC - ROS 2 Hardware Acceleration Architecture and Conventions
• REP 2008 feedback, round 2
• REP 2008 final review and draft vote - ROS 2 Hardware acceleration architecture and conventions - ROS General - Open Robotics Discourse
• [REP-2014] RFC - Benchmarking performance in ROS 2 - ROS General - Open Robotics Discourse

Should REP 2008 be accepted as a draft and move forward in the standardization process?

(22 Yes, 0 No)

How should input data be provided to benchmarks?

Should tests require access to the source code running on each hardware, are we fine accepting binaries or just the results?