Kokkos 3: Programming Model Extensions for the Exascale Era

• Published in: IEEE transactions on parallel and distributed systems Vol. 33; no. 4; p. 1
• Main Authors: Trott, Christian, Lebrun-Grandie, Damien, Arndt, Daniel, Ciesko, Jan, Dang, Vinh, Ellingwood, Nathan, Gayatri, Rahulkumar, Harvey, Evan, Hollman, Daisy S, Ibanez, Daniel Alejandro, Liber, Nevin, Madsen, Jonathan, Miles, Jeff Scott, Poliakoff, David Zoeller, Powell, Amy Jo, Rajamanickam, Sivasankaran, Simberg, Mikael, Sunderland, Dan, Turcksin, Bruno, Wilke, Jeremiah
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York IEEE 01.04.2022; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Benchmark testing; Containers; exascale; Graphics processing units; Hardware; heterogeneous computing; high-performance computing; Kernel; Laboratories; Layout; performance portability; Programming; programming models
• ISSN: 1045-9219; 1558-2183
• DOI: 10.1109/TPDS.2021.3097283

As the push towards exascale hardware has increased the diversity of system architectures, performance portability has become a critical aspect for scientific software. We describe the Kokkos Performance Portable Programming Model that allows developers to write single source applications for diverse high performance computing architectures. Kokkos provides key abstractions for both the compute and memory hierarchy of modern hardware. We describe the novel abstractions that have been added to Kokkos recently such as hierarchical parallelism, containers, task graphs, and arbitrary-sized atomic operations. We demonstrate the performance of these new features with reproducible benchmarks on CPUs and GPUs.