Seminario: “A Performance Portability Study of SYCL Programs: from Micro-Benchmarks to a Drug-Discovery Industrial Application” di Lorenzo Carpentieri

Abstract

In recent years, Heterogeneous Computing has become more popular since it provides many benefits from higher flexibility of hardware usage to energy efficiency. Heterogeneous high-performance computing systems, however, are facing some challenges, especially within the application development cycle. Moreover, evaluating the application performance is no longer bounded to the execution on a single device and there is a need for suitable evaluation methods.

In general, to get more benefits from heterogeneous computing, it is essential to implement applications capable of running on multiple hardware while achieving high performance on each of them with the minimum development effort. In other words, heterogeneous computing should consider "performance portability" in both performance and hardware. This means that in a heterogeneous context, the application should run on different hardware effortlessly while delivering the same performance.

This thesis studies the performance portability of SYCL applications and investigates the challenges of porting an application from CUDA to SYCL. For this purpose, we have implemented a micro-benchmark and performed the CUDA-to-SYCL porting of the LiGen application, which is a real-world drug discovery application.