Question: comparison with Halide

[dkrikun]

Could you please briefly explain how enoki compares with Halide?

[wjakob]

Halide was designed with image processing pipelines in mind -- it facilitates powerful structural changes (multithreading, blocking, SIMD, etc.) to achieve excellent performance for these types of methods. Communication patterns during such a computation can be fairly advanced, and Halide is built to support them. It depends on a fairly large compiler framework (LLVM).

Enoki was originally built to parallelize and differentiate code that numerically evaluates Monte Carlo integrals (i.e. lots of independent function evaluations). It is tiny in comparison, and it solves a much more specific problem. Its main purpose is to take a scalar computation and make it "wide" by performing the same computation on many elements of an array (either on the CPU or the GPU). The computation per SIMD lane/GPU thread is generally expected to be independent. The whole process can be differentiated if desired.