Caliper¶
Caliper renders live ImGui graphics from GPU-resident tensors. Its Metal/MPS and Vulkan/CUDA paths keep accepted dense tensors and geometry off the CPU staging path; OpenGL remains a CPU-staged fallback.
The desktop host owns rendering and the frame loop. C++ applets supply UI and compute through ABI epoch 2 and named service tables.
Development status
Current host: 0.6.0 · SDK: 0.1.0 · ABI epoch: 2. Build Caliper from source. The repository does not currently publish packaged binaries, separate SDK releases, runtime packs, or an applet registry.
Choose a path¶
- Development basics — understand the host, applet, and build model.
- Your first applet — build the smallest ABI-epoch-2 UI applet.
- Your first ML applet — add jobs, metrics, device selection, and tensor views.
- Embedding Caliper — inspect the embeddable host interface.
- ABI and services — read the contract and service reference.
Backend behavior¶
| Backend | Current behavior |
|---|---|
| Metal / MPS | macOS default. Accepted MPS buffers are processed by Metal without host staging. |
| Vulkan / CUDA | Windows default. Device-local external-memory interop; some paths make one device-to-device copy inside VRAM. |
| OpenGL 3.3 | Compatibility fallback. Tensor uploads are CPU-staged inside the host. |
See Rendering and caliper.tensor_bridge.v1 for the exact backend and acceptance rules.
Documentation map¶
- Tutorials — start-to-finish development paths.
- How-to guides — porting, debugging, and ML applet recipes.
- Reference — ABI, manifest, service tables, adapters, embedding, and C++ sugar.
- Explanation — rendering, compatibility, trust, and the planned architecture.
- Decisions — the project decision log.
Source of truth¶
Reference pages embed current headers and examples with checked snippets, and mkdocs build --strict fails on missing sources, links, or anchors. PLATFORM.md is a planning and design specification; where it describes future repository topology or distribution, those parts are not current shipped behavior.