Session

DescriptionIn this minisymposium we address an important question: how do we future proof scientific codes on a rapidly changing hardware landscape of heterogeneous computing platforms which, at present consists of CPU+GPU systems, with significant differences between the GPUs. Given that the language(s)/API(s)/Pragma(s) to offload instructions/data from/to the GPUs on these systems (e.g. SYCL, HIP, OpenMP-5.x) are very different, the task of refactoring large scientific codes, each with their own dependencies on libraries, is a daunting one. Consequently, the questions that are uppermost in minds of code developers are: a) how feasible is it to use a high level hardware abstraction layer (HAL) that would make codes portable across the various heterogeneous computing platforms, and b) will these HALs continue to be developed when there are other accelerators that become part of the hardware landscape? In this mini-symposia we shine the spotlight on one such HAL, namely, Kokkos, that is being developed by the US Department of Energy, as part of the exascale computing program (ECP). We have four talks on the usability of Kokkos, on the development of mesh and particle based scientific codes, and on a specialized scientific library, all of which leverage Kokkos for portability.