Birds of a Feather Archive

Performance Portability in a Heterogenous World - Pipe Dream?

Authors: David Martin (Argonne National Laboratory (ANL)), Thomas Steinke (Zuse Institute Berlin), Nalini Kumar (Intel Corporation), Clayton Hughes (Sandia National Laboratories), Christopher Mauney (Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL))

Abstract: With increasing heterogeneity in system deployments (CPUs, GPGPUs, AI accelerators, FPGAs, IPU/DPUs), HPC users face a daunting task of programming for such diverse architectures. This BoF, organized by the IXPUG, but not limited to Intel technology, will focus on sharing expertise in portable programming across a wide variety of architectures, running a diverse set of workloads. This BoF will explore current approaches and best practices for programming across heterogeneous systems and exotic architectures, with the goal of identifying a common set of principles and practices that can be leveraged to develop and maintain software across sites, architectures, and applications.

Long Description: The Intel eXtreme Performance Computing Users Group (IXPUG) is a worldwide community of hundreds of application users, software developers and HPC center staff that utilize Intel hardware and software technologies (processors, accelerators, memory, software tools and storage middleware) to solve some of the world’s most challenging problems on some of the world’s most powerful supercomputers.

This BoF, organized by the IXPUG, but not limited to Intel technologies, will focus on sharing experiences and expertise in programming systems across a wide variety of architectures, running a diverse set of simulation, data analytics and AI workloads. With increasing heterogeneity across the computing landscape over the last few years and community expectations that system diversity will likely intensify over the coming years, programming models and programming abstractions that enable efficient programming across a variety of computing architectures for a wide range of application workloads have become a necessity for application developers and computational scientists. Different underlying hardware architectures, parallelization strategies, hardware features and primitives make it challenging to develop application software that can efficiently run across machines and sites. This BoF will explore current approaches and best practices for programming heterogeneous systems and exotic architectures, with the goal of identifying a unified set of principles and practices that can be leveraged to develop and maintain SW across sites, architectures, and applications.

Through invited talks by HPC center staff and developers of commonly used programming abstractions such as Kokkos, RAJA, SYCL, oneAPI, etc, that have real-world experience benchmarking a wide variety of systems, the BoF will provide a forum for researchers, application programmers, HPC center staff and industry experts to share experiences in efficiently programming increasingly heterogeneous systems with increasingly varied workloads. The first half of the BoF will be short presentations, followed by a moderated discussion among the speakers and audience.

This BoF follows productive and well-attended IXPUG BoFs starting from SC14 and continuing through SC21, attracting 80-150 attendees each year. IXPUG has also hosted related BoFs and workshops at ISC and HPC Asia. The IXPUG steering group has confirmed a diverse group of experts to give short presentations on programming abstractions and models for portability currently in use by developers/users and challenges they foresee in the upcoming years. A moderated discussion will complete the session and allow attendees to interact with speakers and share their own experiences.

Topics covered: - Portable programming models like Kokkos, RAJA, SYCL, OpenACC, High-performance Python - Mapping programming models to architectures - Containers for portability - Tradeoffs between portability and efficiency - Real-world experiences in developing portable code across different architectures

URL: https://www.ixpug.org/SC22-BOF


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