CHARM-SYCL & IRIS: A Tool Chain for Performance Portability on Extremely Heterogeneous Systems

Abstract

Performance portability is becoming crucial as high-performance computing systems become increasingly heterogeneous. We have many options for CPUs and accelerators (e.g., GPUs) but also for non-Von Neumann architectures such as field-programmable gate arrays. This paper presents the CHARM-SYCL unified programming environment for multiple accelerator types as a performance-portable programming environment. It uses the IRIS library developed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory as the back end accelerator runtime. IRIS has a high-performance scheduler to distribute tasks across accelerators. This design allows us to run an application from the same source on multiple systems with multiple configurations. We provide three types of portability with CHARM-SYCL: Portable Workflow, Compiler and Runtime Portability, and Application and Performance Portability. We implement a Monte Carlo simulation benchmark code on the CHARM-SYCL execution environment and demonstrate that our programming environment can accommodate extremely heterogeneous systems.