Achieving near native runtime performance and cross-platform performance portability for random number generation through SYCL interoperability

Abstract

High-performance computing (HPC) is a major driver accelerating scientific research and discovery, from quantum simulations to medical therapeutics. The growing number of new HPC systems coming online are being furnished with various hardware components, engineered by competing industry entities, each having their own architectures and platforms to be supported. While the increasing availability of these resources is in many cases pivotal to successful science, even the largest collaborations lack the computational expertise required for maximal exploitation of current hardware capabilities. The need to maintain multiple platform-specific codebases further complicates matters, potentially adding a constraint on the number of machines that can be utilized. Fortunately, numerous programming models are under development that aim to facilitate software solutions for heterogeneous computing. In particular is SYCL, an open standard, C++-based single-source programming paradigm. Among SYCL's features is interoperability, a mechanism through which applications and third-party libraries coordinate sharing data and execute collaboratively. In this paper, we leverage the SYCL programming model to demonstrate cross-platform performance portability across heterogeneous resources. We detail our NVIDIA and AMD random number generator extensions to the oneMKL open-source interfaces library. Performance portability is measured relative to platformspecific baseline applications executed on four major hardware platforms using two different compilers supporting SYCL. The utility of our extensions are exemplified in a real-world setting via a high-energy physics simulation application. We show the performance of implementations that capitalize on SYCL interoperability are at par with native implementations, attesting to the cross-platform performance portability of a SYCL-based approach to scientific codes.

Portability: A Necessary Approach for Future Scientific Software

“…The applicability of our SYCL-based Random Number Generators (RNGs) [41,42] has been evaluated in a GPU port of FastCaloSim [43]. The interfaces we developed enabled the seamless integration of SYCL RNGs into FastCaloSim with no code modification across the evaluated platforms.…”