Intro: Het from BITS Goa, starting on ISPC Backend.

[het1803]

Hi GeNN Team,

I am Het Patel, a 1st year EEE student from BITS Pilani, Goa Campus. I want to work on the ISPC Backend project for GSoC 2026.

I have already:

1)Set up GeNN on WSL and ran the Potjans-Diesmann model.

2)Written a manual "Hello World" ISPC kernel and linked it to a C++ driver to verify parallel execution.

3)Explored the source code and found where the loops are generated, specifically in backendSIMT.cc and initGroupMerged.cc.

I can see how groupEnv.getStream() is used to print C++ loops, and I want to learn how to adapt this to generate ISPC foreach blocks instead. I am very motivated to help make GeNN faster for CPU users.

Looking forward to hearing from you!

Best, Het Patel

[neworderofjamie]

Hi @het1803, I'm afraid we're not participating in GSoC this year.

[het1803]

Hi @neworderofjamie , thank you for letting me know! I am disappointed but I still really like the project. Since I have already started learning about ISPC and the GeNN backend, I would love to continue contributing as a volunteer if that is okay? It is a great way for me to learn more about high-performance computing. I will keep exploring the code and might reach out if I have specific questions.

[neworderofjamie]

Of course! We did a lot of work on ISPC last year in #710 but the reason it hasn't been merged is because it ends up copy-pasting most of the single threaded CPU BACKEND resulting in a maintainance burden. The solution is probably to split the single threaded CPU backend into a BackendCPUBase class and then derive ISPC and the single threaded CPU off that (similar to the relationship between backend SIMT and CUDAHIP)