Performance Portability in the Exascale Computing Project: Exploration Through a Panel Series

• Published in: Computing in science & engineering 2021-09, Vol.23 (5), p.46-54
• Main Authors: Dubey, Anshu, McInnes, Lois Curfman, Thakur, Rajeev, Draeger, Erik W., Evans, Thomas, Germann, Timothy C., Hart, William E.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Computation; Data visualization; Exascale computing; Graphics processing units; Hardware; MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING; Portability; Programming
• ISSN: 1521-9615; 1558-366X
• DOI: 10.1109/MCSE.2021.3098231

Performance portability is a critical issue for the Exascale Computing Project (ECP) because of nontrivial architectural differences between machines available today and those expected at exascale. Many ECP project teams are working toward performance portability, and would expect to benefit from sharing lessons learned, identifying gaps, and discovering opportunities for partnerships. To facilitate this communication, the IDEAS-ECP project partnered with the three focus areas of ECP (application development, software technology, and hardware and integration), and Department of Energy computing facilities, to lead a series of panel discussions on performance portability. The panels were organized around broadly common themes of algorithmic and data locality challenges. In this article, we describe the panel series, its objectives, and perspectives from the various areas of the project. We also discuss use cases that are distinctive, as well as conclusions drawn from the collective experience of the participants.