HIPLZ: Enabling Performance Portability for Exascale Systems

Abstract

While heterogeneous computing has emerged as a dominant trend in current and future High-Performance Computing (HPC) systems, it is also widely recognized that this shift has led to increased software complexity due to a proliferation of programming systems for different heterogeneous processors. One such example is the Heterogeneous-Computing Interface for Portability from AMD (HIP), which is composed of a C Runtime API and C++ Kernel Language. Many HPC applications will likely use HIP on future exascale systems (e.g., Frontier and El Capitan), but HIP currently only targets AMD and NVIDIA processors. This limitation creates challenges for users who would also like to run their applications on exascale systems based on other architectures (e.g., Aurora, which is based on Intel hardware) that are currently not targeted by HIP.

In this paper, we introduce the design and implementation of HIPLZ, a compiler and runtime system that uses the Intel Level Zero API to support HIP on Intel GPU architectures. We discuss the design of HIPLZ, derived from HIPCL (an implementation of HIP on top of OpenCL), and portability issues that occur from using the Level Zero runtime as a backend. We evaluate our implementation by running several performance benchmarks and mini-apps written in HIP on Intel architectures using HIPLZ. Our results show that this approach provides competitive performance relative to Intel’s OpenCL implementations on Intel Gen9 GPUs, while providing good coverage of features needed by HPC applications. Overall, this approach is a promising demonstration of enabling performance portability for exascale systems.