Code Generation for Room Acoustics Simulations with Complex Boundary Conditions

Abstract

The software and hardware landscape of high performance computing is expanding faster than computational scientists can take advantage of new frameworks and platforms. In an ideal world, simulation codes would be written once in a high-level manner and achieve high-performance anywhere, but the reality is more complicated. Currently, high-level solutions lack support for sophisticated physical models across different parallel backends. Existing solutions with appropriate support are low-level and, therefore, tied to a specific hardware target.We present an approach that tackles this problem with a modularized separation of concerns: a middle layer separates the management of generating low-level optimized code from a highlevel programmable layer. In this paper, we describe how our contributions to this hardware-agnostic, middle-layer language provide functionality for complex room acoustics simulations, a type of Finite Difference Time Domain (FDTD) simulation using stencils which is representative of many other 3D wave models. We show that we are able to develop performance-portable codes for these types of models which leads to performance on par with tuned hand-written implementations. Furthermore, we show how this approach is used to develop both host and device side code for multi-kernel applications, as is required for room acoustics simulations with complex boundaries.