TechTalk 24: Cross-Platform GPU Programming Without the Heartburn

About the Event

Graphics processing units (GPUs) are an important component of high-performance computing (HPC) and AI infrastructure, as they offer substantially higher performance and efficiency than general CPUs for many scientific workflows. However, programming for GPUs requires close attention to low-level hardware details in order to achieve good performance, while the emergence of HPC-focused GPUs from multiple hardware vendors, each with their own programming languages and APIs, has complicated the programming landscape. This means that porting to a new platform or GPU vendor can require substantial code rewrites, dramatically increasing the costs of software maintenance.

In this talk, our speaker Dr Emily Kahl, a research software engineer at the Australian Institute for Bioengineering and Nanotechnology (AIBN) at the University of Queensland, will provide an overview of some recent attempts to overcome this issue in the C++ programming space. She will:

• discuss the current state of vendor-specific programming models, followed by an overview of some promising frameworks for vendor-agnostic development of GPU-accelerated scientific codes in high performance C++
• compare the ease of use, support for tooling and performance of the Kokkos, SYCL and OpenMP programming models and discuss lessons learned from my time developing high-performance, GPU-accelerated molecular dynamics applications
• discuss the implications of the changing GPU landscape for the long-term sustainability of scientific software.

Speaker

Dr Emily Kahl develops and maintains software for molecular simulation, with a specific focus on GPU-accelerated computing and machine learning methods in quantum chemistry. Emily is also an advocate for open-source software in computational science. Code she has developed for atomic and molecular physics has seen widespread use by Australian and international researchers.

Learn more about Emily and her work from our June 2022 interview with her.

Who Should Attend

• Research software engineers
• Academics
• Coders
• Other interested parties

Recording and Slides

A recording and slides from this event are now available.

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