Merge pull request #29 from crutcher/crutcher-improved-readme

Improved landing README.md.

Author: crutcher

README.md

@@ -1,66 +1,99 @@
-# Tensor Tapestry Compiler Suite
+# Tapestry Tensor Expression Compiler Suite
+
+<center><b>"It's Just One Ocean"<br/>-Crutcher</b></center>
+
+## Overview
+
+<img style="float: right; width: 20%; margin: 10px" alt="linear.relu.4x" src="docs/media/linear.relu.4x.ortho.jpg"/>
+
+**Tapestry** is an experimental tensor expression compiler framework.
+
+Modern GPU-filled datacenters contain thousands of nodes with 8+ GPUs each, and are capable of
+performing trillions of floating point operations per second. The goal of **Tapestry** is to unlock
+the full potential of modern GPU-filled datacenters, by providing a foundational programming
+environment for scalable, optimized, massively multi-GPU tensor programs.
+
+Tensor programs underlie all deep-network based AI, and all finite element numerical simulations.
+These include numerical weather and fluid simulations, protein folding and drug discovery
+simulations, quantum chemistry simulations, financial simulations, and material design and
+manufacturing simulations. Modern tensor programming environments are designed to maximize
+productivity of developers working on single-GPU workstations, and struggle to express programs
+which can be scheduled across even a few GPUs. Some of these frameworks do have solutions to scaling
+up limited workloads, but no general-purpose solutions exist for scaling up arbitrary tensor
+programs.
+
+Multiple existing companies operate with >$1B/year annual hardware budgets for these simulations,
+somewhere in the dozens of $B/year are being spent worldwide on these calculations today.
+
+Though it is difficult to predict in advance the speedups of a new optimizing compiler, it is the
+case that, due to the semantics of their programming models, the vast majority of existing tensor
+applications are run with no meaningful structural optimizations; the programs are run directly as
+human engineers have written them, with no further optimizations. This is akin to directly executing
+a SQL query without any query planner or optimizer. The potential wins in efficiency for existing
+applications from an optimizing compiler are therefore large; conservatively in the 30% range; but
+for some applications, the potential is dramatically larger.
+
+Irrespective of efficiency wins, the potential for new applications is tremendous; existing
+applications are limited by the interconnect scheduling and manual design of the programs, and
+removing these limitations will enable new applications which are not possible today.
+
+At the current time, **Tapestry** is sitting upon years of development towards a solid theoretical
+foundation, of shardable, composable, and re-writable polyhedral model tensor block algebra
+operation expressions on an extensible compiler framework. The work is focused on exploiting this
+mathematical foundation towards a practical compiler suite. Expectations are that the project needs
+1-3 aggregate engineer-years of work to reach a state where it can be used to compile real-world
+applications.
+
+This is a big-pull project; the payoffs are huge, but the work required to climb from theory back to
+practical parity with existing frameworks is substantial. There are many opportunities for
+development applications along the way, empowered by that solid theoretical foundation. We are
+seeking contributors, reviewers, and enthusiasts to help bring this project to life sooner. Funding
+support, or safe-harbor in a larger organization, would also be very helpful.
 
-See the full [Tapestry Documentation](docs/README.md) for detailed information.
-
-Join the Discord Server:
+## Getting Started
 
-[![Banner](https://invidget.switchblade.xyz/PNpSrFMeUb?theme=light)](https://discord.gg/PNpSrFMeUb)
+### Read the Documentation
 
-**Tapestry** is an experimental tensor expression optimizing compiler suite.
+The full [Tapestry Documentation](docs/README.md) provides much more detailed information about the
+project's motivation, goals, design, and implementation.
 
-It exists to make it easy to optimize applications (such as AI) to maximally exploit both
-datacenters full of GPUs, and integrated FPGA stacks.
+### Join the Discord
 
-The goal of **Tapestry** is to provide an ecosystem for a high-performance stochastic pareto-front
-optimizer for distributed tensor expressions, targeting optimizations which are permitted to search
-for extended time on a large number of machines.
+[![Banner](https://invidget.switchblade.xyz/PNpSrFMeUb?theme=light)](https://discord.gg/PNpSrFMeUb)
 
-Here are examples showing a **Linear**/**ReLU** pipeline, with and without sub-block sharding;
-demonstrating the potential for sub-shard operation fusion:
+If you have any interest in the project, please join the Discord server. We are actively looking for
+reviewers, contributors, fans, theorists, and developers and would love to have you involved.
 
-<table cellborder="0">
-  <tr>
-    <td>
-      <div style="width: 100%; margin: auto">
-        <img alt="linear.relu" src="docs/media/linear.relu.ortho.jpg"/>
-      </div>
-    </td>
-    <td>
-      <div style="width: 100%; margin: auto">
-        <img alt="linear.relu.4x" src="docs/media/linear.relu.4x.ortho.jpg"/>
-      </div>
-    </td>
-  </tr>
-</table>
+A huge portion of bringing this project to life is building a community of enthusiasts and experts
+who can help guide the project, not only through theory and code; but also through iterative
+development of the documentation, making the project accessible to wider audiences.
 
-## Contributing
+We are particularly interested in:
 
-I'm actively looking for contributors to help with building or reviewing the project.
+- document reviewers
+- project managers
+- programmers
+- compiler theorists
 
-If you'd like to get involved, please post any questions in the project
-[Discussions](https://github.com/crutcher/loom/discussions) board, or open an issue.
+### File an Issue / Bug
 
-We could create a Discord server; if we got enough traction.
+We are actively looking for feedback on the project. If you have any issues, please file a bug on
+the [Issues](https://github.com/crutcher/tapestry/issues) page.
 
-I'm particularly interested in contributors with experience in the following areas:
+### Join the Discussions
 
-- maven lifecycle / package publishing
-- technical documentation / editing
-- compiler design
-- tensor algebra
-- optimization theory
-- graph transformations
-- graph representation
-- distributed computing
-- graph visualization
+If you have longer-form concerns to discuss, please post them in the project
+[Discussions](https://github.com/crutcher/loom/discussions) board.
 
-## Getting Started
+## Setup / Contributing Code
 
-In the current stage of development, **loom** produces no tool targets; and exists solely as a
-collection of libraries and tests.
+If you are interested in running the existing test suites, or contributing code, you'll need to
+clone the repository and setup the development environment.
 
-It **should** setup cleanly in any modern development environment; but full external dependencies
-are not yet documented.
+The project is a JDK 21 multi-module Maven/Java project, and should be setup in any modern
+development IDE (JetBrains, VSC, etc).
 
-Documenting missing dependencies is a high priority and setup instructions is another high priority
-which contributors could help with.
+That said, the project has been developed by one person thus far, and may have some missing
+dependencies or undocumented requirements. If you run into any issues, please join the Discord or
+file a bug (or both!) with as much information as possible, and I'll prioritize fixing the cause or
+documenting the missing dependency.