Sovereign GPU Pipeline: The Vendor Replacement Story

What we have already replaced, what we’re replacing next, and what the end state looks like — a pure Rust scientific GPU stack with zero proprietary dependencies.

Last Updated: March 17, 2026
License: CC-BY-SA 4.0

The Claim

Four public primals — BarraCuda (math), 🐸🍄 ToadStool (orchestration), 🪸🌊 coralReef (compiler), and coral-glowplug (hardware lifecycle) — together replace the NVIDIA CUDA toolchain for scientific computing. Not all of it yet. But a clear, advancing front that already produces paper-parity lattice QCD on a $500 consumer GPU.

This is not a research prototype. These are production-grade primals with 107,000+ combined test functions across 3.2 million lines of Rust, zero unsafe code, and zero C dependencies in application code.

What’s Already Replaced

1. CUDA Runtime → toadStool + wgpu/Vulkan

Key difference: toadStool discovers hardware at runtime by capability, not by vendor ID. The same code discovers NVIDIA, AMD, Intel, and BrainChip NPU. There is no concept of “CUDA device 0” — there is “the device that supports f64 and has >8GB VRAM.”

2. cuBLAS / cuFFT / cuDNN → BarraCuda WGSL Shaders

806 WGSL shaders total — every one is f64-canonical (native f64 on pro GPUs, DF64 emulation on consumer GPUs). Key domains:

3. nvcc / ptxas → coralReef Sovereign Compiler

What “46/46 shaders compile” means: 46 representative 🐟⚡ barraCuda shaders — covering every domain (bio, physics, ML, linear algebra) — compile from WGSL to native SASS (SM70 Volta, SM86 Ampere) and native RDNA2 (GFX1030) without ANY vendor toolchain. No nvcc, no ptxas, no ROCm. Pure Rust compiler.

4. NVIDIA Kernel Driver → coral-glowplug + VFIO

coral-glowplug is a systemd daemon that manages GPU lifecycle without any NVIDIA software. It binds GPUs to vfio-pci at boot, provides hot-swap personality management (VfioPersonality, NouveauPersonality, AmdgpuPersonality), health monitoring, and graceful shutdown — all via JSON-RPC 2.0 over Unix socket.

Current Performance vs CUDA/Kokkos

The gap is narrowing: 🔥♨️ hotSpring Kokkos parity tracking shows 27×→12.4×→3.7× improvement over three months. The remaining gap is primarily in DF64 transcendental functions (exp, log, sin, cos) where NVIDIA’s NVVM has hand-optimized silicon paths. 🪸🌊 coralReef’s sovereign transcendentals use Newton-Raphson iteration at slightly higher latency.

What’s Coming Next (Near-Term, Given Velocity)

Based on the 27-day sprint velocity (architecture/EVOLUTION_TIMELINE.md), with BarraCuda gaining ~50 new shaders/month and 🪸🌊 coralReef closing 2–3 NVVM bypass patterns per iteration:

3 Months (June 2026)

6 Months (September 2026)

12 Months (March 2027)

The Proprietary Cost of What We Replace

Annual lab savings (conservative): $0 in software licenses (all were technically free) but ~$50K–200K in HPC allocations avoided for a lab running regular plasma, QCD, or bioinformatics GPU workloads. Plus the unmeasurable value of zero-queue 24/7 access and data that never leaves the lab.

The Sovereign Stack Diagram

Application Layer
  └── Springs (wetSpring, hotSpring, neuralSpring, etc.)
      └── Science experiments: reproduce published papers

Math Layer
  └── BarraCuda v0.3.5 (806 WGSL shaders, 3,772 tests)
      └── f64-canonical math: what to compute

Orchestration Layer
  └── ToadStool S157 (96 JSON-RPC methods, 21,156 tests)
      └── Hardware discovery: where and how to compute

Compiler Layer
  └── coralReef Phase 10 Iter 53 (2,241 tests)
      └── WGSL → SPIR-V → native SASS/RDNA2

Hardware Layer
  └── coral-glowplug (systemd daemon, JSON-RPC)
      └── VFIO device lifecycle: boot, bind, dispatch, recover

Nothing above depends on:
  ✗ NVIDIA CUDA toolkit
  ✗ nvcc / ptxas / NVVM
  ✗ nvidia.ko kernel module
  ✗ Any C/C++ library
  ✗ Any cloud service
  ✗ Any vendor-specific API

Every layer is pure Rust, AGPL-3.0, and publicly auditable. The entire scientific computing stack — from math primitives to GPU binary compilation to hardware lifecycle management — belongs to the user.

Repositories:
ecoPrimals/barraCuda · ecoPrimals/toadStool · ecoPrimals/coralReef · syntheticChemistry/hotSpring