Abstract
Given the increasing diversity of multi- and many-core processors, portability is a desirable feature of applications designed and implemented for such platforms. Portability is unanimously seen as a productivity enabler, but it is also considered a major performance blocker. Thus, performance portability has emerged as the property of an application to preserve similar form and similar performance on a set of platforms; a first metric, based on extensive evaluation, has been proposed to quantify performance portability for a given application on a set of given platforms.
In this work, we explore the challenges and limitations of this performance portability metric (PPM) on two levels. We first use 5 OpenACC applications and 3 platforms, and we demonstrate how to compute and interpret PPM in this context. Our results indicate specific challenges in parameter selection and results interpretation. Second, we use controlled experiments to assess the impact of platform-specific optimizations on both performance and performance portability. Our results illustrate, for our 5 OpenACC applications, a clear tension between performance improvement and performance portability improvement.
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Notes
- 1.
All applications use single precision floating point data types, with Diffusion Operator being the only exception.
- 2.
- 3.
Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility, https://github.com/olcf/vector_addition_tutorials.
- 4.
yuhc, https://github.com/yuhc/gpu-rodinia [3].
- 5.
In all notations with a subscript m or peak, m stands for measured, and peak represents a form of peak performance.
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We would like to thank Jason Sewall and John Pennycook for their help in designing our experiments and interpreting the results.
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Dreuning, H., Heirman, R., Varbanescu, A.L. (2018). A Beginner’s Guide to Estimating and Improving Performance Portability. In: Yokota, R., Weiland, M., Shalf, J., Alam, S. (eds) High Performance Computing. ISC High Performance 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11203. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02465-9_52
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