Performance-Portable Many-Core Plasma Simulations: Porting PIConGPU to OpenPower and Beyond

Research output: Contribution to book/conference proceedings/anthology/reportConference contributionContributedpeer-review

Contributors

Abstract

With the appearance of the heterogeneous platform Open-Power, many-core accelerator devices have been coupled with Power host processors for the first time. Towards utilizing their full potential, it is worth investigating performance portable algorithms that allow to choose the best-fitting hardware for each domain-specific compute task. Suiting even the high level of parallelism on modern GPGPUs, our presented approach relies heavily on abstract meta-programming techniques, which are essential to focus on fine-grained tuning rather than code porting. With this in mind, the CUDA-based open-source plasma simulation code PIConGPU is currently being abstracted to support the heterogeneous OpenPower platform using our fast porting interface cupla, which wraps the abstract parallel C++11 kernel acceleration library Alpaka.

We demonstrate how PIConGPU can benefit from the tunable kernel execution strategies of the Alpaka library, achieving portability and performance with single-source kernels on conventional CPUs, Power8 CPUs and NVIDIA GPUs.

Details

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationHigh Performance Computing
EditorsM Taufer, B Mohr, JM Kunkel
PublisherSpringer, Berlin [u. a.]
Pages293-301
Number of pages9
ISBN (print)978-3-319-46078-9
Publication statusPublished - 2016
Peer-reviewedYes

Publication series

SeriesLecture Notes in Computer Science, Volume 9945
ISSN0302-9743

Conference

TitleInternational Supercomputing Conference (ISC High Performance)
Duration19 - 23 June 2016
CityFrankfurt
CountryGermany

External IDs

Scopus 84992665616

Keywords

Keywords

  • OpenPower, Heterogeneous computing, HPC, C++11, CUDA, OpenMP, Particle-in-cell, Platform portability, Performance portability

Library keywords