Evaluating Performance Portability of OpenACC

Abstract

Accelerator-based heterogeneous computing is gaining momentum in High Performance Computing arena. However, the increased complexity of the accelerator architectures demands more generic, high-level programming models. OpenACC is one such attempt to tackle the problem. While the abstraction endowed by OpenACC offers productivity, it raises questions on its portability. This paper evaluates the performance portability obtained by OpenACC on twelve OpenACC programs on NVIDIA CUDA, AMD GCN, and Intel MIC architectures. We study the effects of various compiler optimizations and OpenACC program settings on these architectures to provide insights into the achieved performance portability.