Kokkos Programming Model and Library

Abstract

High performance computing is in the midst of a many-core revolution driven by rapidly evolving microchips with diverse and heterogeneous architectures, increasing concurrency (thread count), and decreasing memory per thread. Our HPC applications face a major challenge to effectively use these microchips with a single code base that is performance portable across these evolving architectures. Kokkos was developed to enable on-chip concurrency and manage architecture-dependent constraints on memory access patterns. The goal is to maximize the amount of application code that is portable across diverse architectures and still obtain the same (or nearly) performance as a variant of that code written specifically for that architecture. The Kokkos team has ongoing R&D co-design collaborations with Sandia's and vendors' microchip and system engineers to rapidly incorporate evolving computer architecture features into Kokkos. The team is also providing leadership for DOE laboratories' participation on the ISO/C++ language standard committee to subsuming Kokkos features into a future standard.