Towards performance portability through runtime adaptation for high‐performance computing applications

Abstract

AbstractThe Abstract Data and Communication Library (ADCL) is an adaptive communication library optimizing application level group communication operations at runtime. The library provides for a given communication pattern a large number of implementations and incorporates a runtime selection logic in order to choose the implementation leading to the highest performance. In this paper, we demonstrate how an application utilizing ADCL is deployed on a wide range of HPC architectures, including an IBM Blue Gene/L, an NEC SX‐8, an IBM Power PC cluster using an IBM Federation Switch, an AMD Opteron cluster utilizing a 4xInfiniBand and a Gigabit Ethernet network, and an Intel EM64T cluster using a hierarchical Gigabit Ethernet network with reduced uplink bandwidth. We demonstrate, how different implementations for the three‐dimensional neighborhood communication lead to the minimal execution time of the application on different architectures. ADCL gives the user the advantage of having to maintain only a single version of the source code and still have the ability to achieve close to optimal performance for the application on all architectures. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.