Is it possible to write a shader in Vulkan that traverses a structured grid instead of using indices?

In OpenGL, the most efficient way I know to render a grid like a sphere is to use indexing. First, you generate the vertices, then you generate a triangle strip like:

0 1 2 3 4 5 .. 0 1

for each row, adding a degenerate triangle at the end of each row and traversing to the next row.

I don’t know the machine-language architecture of GPUs except what is described in the CUDA programmers manual, but it seems to me that even faster than sequentially loading indices would be calculating the indices directly.
Ignore the north and south pole, and just consider an m x n grid covering most of a sphere. For each location, I can define the triangles:

pi, p(i+1), p(i+row)
p(i+1), p(i+row), p(i+row+1)

clearly I can do this in a loop in C++, so it could be done in a loop in machine language on the graphics card. Just as the multiple cores on the graphics card are somehow distributed to compute all the individual points from indices, they could be assigned to multiple points in the grid.

My question is, OpenGL doesn’t provide any way to do this in GLSL. Does Vulkan support any means in SPIRV to do this?