Domain‐specific virtual processors as a portable programming and execution model for parallel computational workloads on modern heterogeneous high‐performance computing architectures

Abstract

We advocate domain‐specific virtual processors (DSVP) as a portability layer for expressing and executing domain‐specific computational workloads on modern heterogeneous HPC architectures, with applications in quantum chemistry. Specifically, in this article we extend, generalize and better formalize the concept of a domain‐specific virtual processor as applied to scientific high‐performance computing. In particular, we introduce a system‐wide recursive (hierarchical) hardware encapsulation mechanism into the DSVP architecture and specify a concrete microarchitectural design of an abstract DSVP from which specialized DSVP implementations can be derived for specific scientific domains. Subsequently, we demonstrate, an example of a domain‐specific virtual processor specialized to numerical tensor algebra workloads, which is implemented in the ExaTENSOR library developed by the author with a primary focus on the quantum many‐body computational workloads on large‐scale GPU‐accelerated HPC platforms.