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sKokkos: Enabling Kokkos with Transparent Device Selection on Heterogeneous Systems using OpenACC

by Seyong Lee, Jeffrey S Vetter, Joel E Denny, Keita Teranishi, Pedro Valero Lara
Publication Type
Conference Paper
Book Title
HPCAsia '24: Proceedings of the International Conference on High Performance Computing in Asia-Pacific Region
Publication Date
Page Numbers
23 to 24
Publisher Location
New York, New York, United States of America
Conference Name
HPCAsia '24: International Conference on High Performance Computing in Asia-Pacific Region
Conference Location
Nagoya, Japan
Conference Sponsor
ACM
Conference Date
-

This paper presents a new feature to enable Kokkos with transparent device selection. For application developers, it is not easy to
identify which device is the most appropriate to use in a heterogeneous system, since this depends on the characteristics of both the application and the hardware. In Kokkos, a backend is associated with one specific programming model/hardware. Programmers decide which backend to use at compilation time. This new feature implemented on the OpenACC backend eliminates the burden of deciding which device to use, providing a highly productive programming solution for Kokkos applications. This work includes implementation details and a performance study conducted with a set of mini-benchmarks (i.e., AXPY and dot product), kernels (Lattice-Bolzmann method), and two mini-apps (LULESH and miniFE) on two heterogeneous systems with different hardware capabilities. This new Kokkos feature provides high accelerations of up to 35× thanks to automatic and transparent device selection.