Computer Systems Exploration

Overview

This project serves as a personal journey to refresh and deepen understanding of computer systems while simultaneously enhancing skills in C and Rust programming languages. It is designed as a learning project where code implementations and theoretical concepts will be explored and documented.

Objectives

• To revisit and reinforce fundamental concepts of computer systems.
• To practice and improve programming skills in C and Rust.
• To document the learning process and code implementations for future reference.

Technologies

• C Programming Language: Used for low-level system programming to interact directly with hardware and manipulate memory efficiently.
• Rust Programming Language: Employed for safe system-level programming, focusing on ownership, concurrency, and safety.

Project Structure

• /c: Contains all C language related code and examples.
• /rust: Houses Rust language implementations and examples.
• /docs: Includes documentation and notes on computer systems concepts.

Getting Started

To get started with this project, clone the repository and explore the structured directories.

git clone https://github.com/yourusername/computer_systems.git
cd computer_systems

To run the Metal examples, you need to first compile the Metal shader source files into a binary format that can be used by your application. Here's how you can compile and use the dotprod.metal shader:

1. Compile the Metal shader source file to an intermediate AIR file:

   xcrun -sdk macosx metal -c dotprod.metal -o dotprod.air

2. Convert the AIR file to a Metal Library file:

   xcrun -sdk macosx metallib dotprod.air -o dotprod.metallib

3. After compiling the shaders, you can check the main.rs file in the metal_examples directory to see how to use these compiled libraries in your Rust code.

These steps ensure that the Metal shaders are ready to be utilized in your project for GPU-accelerated tasks.

Additional resources for learning and understanding Metal with Rust can be found at the following links:

• Using Metal and Rust to Make FFT Even Faster: This blog post provides insights into using Metal with Rust for optimizing FFT computations, which can be beneficial for learning advanced GPU programming techniques.
• metal-rs GitHub Repository: This repository contains Rust bindings for Metal, offering various code examples that demonstrate how to use Metal with Rust.
• Metal Playground Examples: This example specifically shows how to handle memory in Metal, which is crucial for understanding GPU resource management in system-level programming.
• Metal Documentation: This is the official documentation for Metal.

I went through above resources for understanding of system-level programming with Metal and Rust.