DOE Performance, Portability and Productivity Annual Meeting

The Department of Energy (DOE) Performance, Portability and Productivity Annual Meeting is an opportunity to share ideas, progress, and challenges toward the goal of performance portability across DOE's current and future advanced supercomputers. The need for applications to run effectively on multiple vendor architecture solutions is pervasive across application teams within the DOE. The two primary goals of this meeting are to:

  • Inform application teams and tool developers of activities and methodologies being used, and foster informal relationships that can help participants benefit from those activities.
  • Identify major challenges toward the goal of performance, portability and productivity, and work with the vendors and tool providers on determining implementations and solutions that will meet their own performance criteria without inadvertently impairing performance results elsewhere.

Recognizing the immense challenges of porting and optimizing large applications to the advanced architecture systems planned for deployment within the DOE's National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) and Office of Science (SC), the DOE laboratories have established Centers of Excellence (COE) at each site to provide direct vendor expertise to the application teams and in turn, give the vendors deeper insight into how applications are run on those systems. Each COE has a mission to optimize a set of applications for their specific platform—however the application teams are motivated to maintain a code base that will run effectively across diverse vendor offerings. Making use of open standards, libraries, and software abstractions that allow for minimal code disruption without negatively impacting performance potential is the preferred path to programming, but it constitutes a large, as-yet-unsolved challenge.

The purpose of this meeting is to provide a forum for best practices and ideas to be shared between application developers, hardware architects and software architects and will focus squarely on the issue of achieving high performance on these emerging platforms without greatly sacrificing portability, productivity and maintainability. We are particularly interested in research that addresses the complexities of real-life applications and/or realistic workloads, the composability challenges arising from the use of bespoke solutions, and the desire to “future-proof” applications in the long term.

This meeting is open to the following: application developers preparing codes for current and future DOE platforms, collaborators at universities & other organizations, vendors who provide (or are potential providers of) the next-generation platforms and/or enabling technologies, and solution-providers (DOE or third party) who are developing software tools aimed at helping application teams approach the challenges of performance portability and productivity.

Since this meeting is an open forum, all accepted presentations must be free of NDA material with appropriate review & release from your organization for public posting. Participants are asked to join in the spirit of cooperation, and a base set of "ground rules" will be suggested to help ensure a productive and non-competitive meeting.

We plan to have a combination of technical talks, panel discussions, breakout sessions, working lunches, and time for informal interactions with colleagues. A final report will be prepared to help guide future work within the COEs.

Program Committee

Chairs: (please email one of us for more information)

Doug Doerfler (LBL) <dwdoerf@lbl.gov>

Jack Deslippe (LBL) <jrdeslippe@lbl.gov>

Rebecca Harman-Baker (LBL) <rjhartmanbaker@lbl.gov>

Rob Neely (LLNL) <neely4@llnl.gov>

Hai Ah Nam (LANL) <hnam@lanl.gov>

Organizing/Steering Committee:

Bill Brantley (AMD)

Charles Ferenbaugh (LANL)

Chip Freitag (AMD)

Mike Glass (SNL)

Rob Hoekstra (SNL)

Ian Karlin (LLNL)

Abdullah (Apo) Kayi (IBM)

John Levesque (Cray)

CJ Newburn (Nvidia)

Scott Parker (ANL)

John Pennycook (Intel)

Nick Romero (ANL)

Phil Roth (ORNL)

Jason Sewall (Intel)

Tjerk Straatsma (ORNL)