Peformance Portability

This project aims to improve the performance of scientific applications on diverse hardware platforms though performance portability. Heterogenous, accelerator-based hardware architectures have become the dominant paradigm in the design of parallel clusters, and maintaining separate versions of a complex scientific application for each architecture is highly undesirable for productivity. As a result, portable programming models such as Kokkos, RAJA, and SYCL have emerged, which allow one code to run on multiple hardware platforms, whether powered by NVIDIA, AMD, or Intel GPUs and CPUs. However, how well these models enable not just single-source correctness but single-source performance across all target systems is not well-understood. We are conducting a comprehensive study of applications and mini-apps from a wide range of scientific domains implemented with multiple programming models across hardware architectures and vendors to analyze how well the available programming models enable performance portability.