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Search indexed NASA NTRS and DOE OSTI research on propulsion, heat transfer, battery materials and energy systems. Follow report and document links to the original sources.

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All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
DOE OSTI2024

JACC: Leveraging HPC Meta-Programming and Performance Portability with the Just-in-Time and LLVM-based Julia Language

We present JACC (Julia for Accelerators), the first high-level, and performance-portable model for the just-in-time and LLVM-based Julia language. JACC provides a unified and lightweight front end across different back ends available in Julia, enabling the same Julia code to run efficiently on many HPC CPU and GPU targets. We evaluated the performance of JACC for common HPC kernels as well as for the most computationally demanding kernels used in applications, HPCCG, a supercomputing benchmark test for sparse domains, and HARVEY, a blood flow simulator to assist in the diagnosis and treatment of patients suffering from vascular diseases. We carried out the performance analysis on the most advanced US DOE supercomputers: Aurora, Frontier, and Perlmutter. Overall, we show that JACC has a negligible overhead versus vendor-specific solutions, reporting GPU speedups with no extra cost to programmability.

Valero-Lara, Pedro↗
DOE OSTI2025

JACC.shared: Leveraging HPC Metaprogramming and Performance Portability for Computations That Use Shared Memory GPUs

In this work, we present JACC.shared, a new feature of Julia for ACCelerators (JACC), which is the performanceportable and metaprogramming model of the just-in-time and LLVM-based Julia language. This new feature allows JACC applications to leverage the high-performance computing (HPC) capabilities of high-bandwidth, on-chip GPU memory. Historically, exploiting high-bandwidth, shared-memory GPUs has not been a priority for high-level programming solutions. JACC.shared covers that gap for the first time, thereby providing a highlevel, portable, and easy-to-use solution for programmers to exploit this memory and supporting all current major accelerator architectures. Well-known HPC and AI workloads, such as multi/hyperspectral imaging and AI convolutions, have been used to evaluate JACC.shared on two exascale GPU architectures hosted by some of the most powerful US Department of Energy supercomputers: Perlmutter (NVIDIA A100) and Frontier (AMD MI250X). The performance evaluation reports speedup of up to 3.5× by adding only one line of code to the base codes, thus providing important accelerators in a simple, portable, and transparent way and elevating the programming productivity and performance-portability capabilities for Julia/JACC HPC, AI, and scientific applications.

Valero Lara, Pedro [ORNL] (ORCID:0000000214794310)↗
DOE OSTI2024

CHARM-SYCL & IRIS: A Tool Chain for Performance Portability on Extremely Heterogeneous Systems

Performance portability is becoming crucial as high-performance computing systems become increasingly heterogeneous. We have many options for CPUs and accelerators (e.g., GPUs) but also for non-Von Neumann architectures such as field-programmable gate arrays. This paper presents the CHARM-SYCL unified programming environment for multiple accelerator types as a performance-portable programming environment. It uses the IRIS library developed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory as the back end accelerator runtime. IRIS has a high-performance scheduler to distribute tasks across accelerators. This design allows us to run an application from the same source on multiple systems with multiple configurations. We provide three types of portability with CHARM-SYCL: Portable Workflow, Compiler and Runtime Portability, and Application and Performance Portability. We implement a Monte Carlo simulation benchmark code on the CHARM-SYCL execution environment and demonstrate that our programming environment can accommodate extremely heterogeneous systems.

Fujita, Norihisa↗
DOE OSTI2025

Oak Ridge National Laboratory Modernizing the Kokkos Build System: Using CMake to Encapsulate the Complexity of Build Instructions for Performance Portable Libraries

Kokkos, a C++ library focused on performance portability, requires a build system that can work with a variety of compilers and hardware. Ideally, users need only select the compiler and architecture and should not have to know or specify how programs using Kokkos are built. CMake can be used to create a flexible, robust build system and automatically configures compilers and settings based on the user’s inputs. Nevertheless, Kokkos’ requirements as a performance portability library for the build system exceed CMake’s current capabilities. This report describes the requirements, solutions, and testing of various implementations to create a CMake-based build system suitable for Kokkos. It compares the strengths and shortcomings of the approaches and evaluates the implementations with respect to the requirements. Because no solution was found to meet all of the requirements, the Kokkos team engaged with the CMake development team to discuss and plan a path toward support for performance-portable build systems in CMake in the future.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗
DOE OSTI2024

Integrating ORNL’s HPC and Neutron Facilities with a Performance-Portable CPU/GPU Ecosystem

We explore the development of a performance-portable CPU/GPU ecosystem to integrate two of the US Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) largest scientific instruments, the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing facility and the Spallation Neutron Source (SNS), both of which are housed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. We select a relevant data reduction workflow use-case to obtain the differential scattering cross-section from data collected by SNS’s CORELLI and TOPAZ instruments. We compare the current CPU-only production implementation using the Garnet Python multiprocess package based on the Mantid C++ framework against our proposed CPU/GPU implementation that uses the LLVM-based, just-in-time Julia scientific language and the JACC.jl performance-portable package. Two proxy apps were developed: (i) an app for extracting relevant Mantid kernels (MDNorm) in C++ and (ii) the Julia MiniVATES.jl miniapp. We present performance results for NVIDIA A100 and AMD MI100 GPUs and AMD EPYC 7513 and 7662 CPUs. The results provide insights for future generations of data reduction software that can embrace performance portability for an integrated research infrastructure across DOE’s experimental and computational facilities.

Hahn, Steven↗
DOE OSTI2026

TChem-atm (v2.0.0): scalable performance-portable multiphase atmospheric chemistry

We present TChem-atm, a performance-portable approach that enables efficient simulation of chemically detailed and multiphase atmospheric chemistry on modern heterogeneous computing architectures. Unlike previous efforts that rely on architecture-specific code or focus exclusively on gas-phase chemistry, TChem-atm supports fully coupled gas–aerosol systems with execution across CPUs, NVIDIA GPUs, and AMD GPUs through the Kokkos programming model. It integrates the flexible multiphase capabilities of the Community Atmospheric Model Chemistry Package (CAMP) with the high-performance kinetic routines of TChem, and includes automatic Jacobian construction with support for a range of stiff ODE solvers. In a proof-of-concept integration with the particle-resolved model PartMC, TChem-atm reproduces the existing PartMC–CAMP implementation within solver tolerances and delivers substantial GPU speedups, especially for large particle populations. Performance benchmarks reveal substantial speedups on GPU platforms, particularly for large particle populations, with consistent results across hardware backends. TChem-atm enables performance-portable execution across CPUs and GPUs, though optimal efficiency may require modest architecture-specific tuning (e.g., team and vector sizes), with up to a twofold improvement on the NVIDIA H100. It directly supports sectional and particle-resolved host models, while modal aerosol schemes require minor adaptation to provide particle-scale quantities such as representative diameters. By enabling chemically detailed, multiphase simulations with performance portability and host-model flexibility, TChem-atm facilitates the incorporation of advanced chemistry into atmospheric models.

Díaz-Ibarra, Oscar Homero [Sandia National Laborat↗
DOE OSTI2025

Benchmarking Operators in Deep Neural Networks for Improving Performance Portability of SYCL

SYCL is a portable programming model for heterogeneous computing, so it is important to obtain reasonable performance portability of SYCL. Towards the goal of better understanding and improving performance portability of SYCL for machine learning workloads, we have been developing benchmarks for basic operators in deep neural networks (DNNs). These operators could be offloaded to heterogeneous computing devices such as graphics processing units (GPUs) to speed up computation. In this paper, we introduce the benchmarks, evaluate the performance of the operators on GPU-based systems, and describe the causes of the performance gap between the SYCL and Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA) kernels. We find that the causes are related to the utilization of the texture cache for read-only data, optimization of the memory accesses with strength reduction, use of local memory, and register usage per thread. We hope that the efforts of developing benchmarks for studying performance portability will stimulate discussion and interactions within the community.

Jin, Zheming [ORNL] (ORCID:000000027197780X)↗
DOE OSTI2026

An immersed interface method for microstructure-scale electrochemical battery models: numerical formulation and performance portable implementation

We present the numerical formulation, verification, and performance portable implementation of an immersed interface method for microstructure scale electrochemical modeling of batteries. The innovation in this approach is the resolution of chemical species and electrostatic potential discontinuities at active interfaces without the use of interface conforming unstructured grids. A unified formulation on Cartesian grids for all domains (electrodes and electrolyte) is used with interfacial flux conditions applied using volume fraction or “color” function gradients. We have developed one dimensional and two dimensional test cases with analytic solutions for electrochemical modeling using which we verified the consistency and accuracy of our scheme. Our solver is also validated against solutions from a macroscale model and an unstructured multi-subdomain solver for a full lithium ion cell. We then demonstrated the utility of our solver on an image-based complex battery electrode microstructure at high charging rate. Our technique also exhibits good scalability on distributed memory architectures using central processing units (CPU), with problem sizes up to 1.8 billion degrees of freedom and with 5400 ranks. Initial performance studies of our open-source performance portable solver showed about 70 times speed up using a graphics processing unit (GPU) compared to single compute core for a problem with 4 million cells.

25 ENERGY STORAGE↗
DOE OSTI2024

Singularity-EOS: Performance Portable Equations of State and Mixed Cell Closures

We present Singularity-EOS, a new performance-portable library for equations of state and related capabilities. Singularity-EOS provides a large set of analytic equations of state, such as the Gruneisen equation of state, and tabulated equation of state data under a unified interface. It also provides support capabilities around these equations of state, such as Python wrappers, solvers for finding pressure-temperature equilibrium between multiple equations of state, and a unique modifier framework, allowing the user to transform a base equation of state, for example by shifting or scaling the specific internal energy. All capabilities are performance portable, meaning they compile and run on both CPU and GPU for a wide variety of architectures.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗
DOE OSTI2025

ExaCA v2.0: A versatile, scalable, and performance portable cellular automata application for additive manufacturing solidification

The previously established ExaCA software for performance portable alloy grain structure simulation has been updated to better represent the solidification behavior during complex alloy processing conditions, such as those encountered during metal additive manufacturing (AM), and for improved performance and scalability. Here, an extension to the time–temperature history input data format and the core ExaCA algorithm to include an arbitrary number of melting and solidification events yielded improved prediction of texture for various melt pool geometries, expanding the range of AM-relevant conditions that can be accurately simulated. Improved heat transport process simulation coupling, including the creation of large raster datasets from single track time–temperature history data and in-memory coupling with the new, performance portable finite difference code Finch, were also demonstrated in example studies on the effect of multilayer AM microstructure predictions on hatch spacing and cell size, respectively. Additional new features are detailed and demonstrated, including the ability to perform simulations using various interfacial response function forms, execute simulations on state-of-the-art hardware, improved usability through post-processing versatility, and improved strong and weak scaling performance. The performance, physics, and versatility improvements demonstrated here will further enable large-scale studies on AM process–microstructure relationships that were not previously possible. Furthermore, the usability improvements and ability to run coupled AM process–microstructure simulations using the Finch-ExaCA workflow will facilitate broader use of this open-source software by the computational materials community.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗
DOE OSTI2025

SYCL for Performance Portability: Application Experience with Coupled Cluster Formalism in Quantum Chemistry on Exascale Systems

The exascale computing has brought unprecedented heterogeneity in node architectures, with systems such as Frontier and Aurora featuring diverse GPU accelerators, network connectivity among others. Ensuring performance portability across these platforms is a key challenge. To address this, we employ the SYCL programming model to develop portable, high-performance quantum chemistry workloads. As a representative application, we focus on the non-iterative Triples component of the coupled-cluster CCSD(T) method, a key driver in quantum chemistry. In this work, we report on our experience deploying SYCL-based implementations using both DPC++ and AdaptiveCPP across two flagship exascale platforms: OLCF Frontier with AMD MI250X GPUs and ALCF Aurora with Intel GPUs. Our results demonstrate that SYCL enables efficient, single-source implementations that scale to thousands of nodes, delivering performance on par with vendor-optimized HIP solutions. We highlight key insights into runtime behavior, kernel portability, and scaling characteristics, showing that SYCL offers a viable path for performance-portable computing.

Bagusetty, Abhishek [Argonne National Laboratory (↗
DOE OSTI2024

A Performance-Portable MultiGPU Implementation of 3D Euler Equations using ProtoX and IRIS

Computational scientists often face challenges when developing and optimizing code for high-performance computing (HPC), especially when trying to leverage GPUs. Given the heterogeneity of the nodes that comprise many modern HPC facilities, considerable demand exists for performance portable solutions for the core computational kernels used in many scientific computing libraries. In this work, we demonstrate a fourth-order finite volume method–based implementation of the Euler equations, which are an integral part of computational fluid dynamics. Our performance-portable multiGPU implementation for Euler equations uses ProtoX to generate kernels and IRIS for portability. ProtoX is a domain-specific language that uses a structured-grid partial differential equation library called Proto as its front end and the SPIRAL code generation system as its back end to generate optimized kernels for different architectures. Optimized kernels generated by ProtoX are orchestrated through the IRIS intelligent runtime system to provide portability. Two levels of optimizations within the IRIS runtime— directed acyclic graph fusion and task fusion—are explored to efficiently utilize computing resources in a multiGPU environment. Performance improvement through these optimizations is showcased by comparing the base ProtoX-IRIS implementation on AMD GPUs (Frontier node) and on NVIDIA GPUs (NVIDIA DGX-1).

Mankad, Het↗
DOE OSTI2025

Enabling Scientific Applications with Performance-Portability and High-Productivity for Multi-GPU Programming with JACC.Multi

This work bridges the gap between multi-GPU computing and high-productivity, performance-portable programming solutions. Our goal is to enhance scientific applications with a productive and portable solution—program once, deploy everywhere—for multi-GPU programming with no cost to programmability. To accomplish this, we implemented JACC.Multi, which is part of the Julia for ACCelerators (JACC) performance-portable framework. JACC. Multi is the only high-level, portable metaprogramming solution that targets multi-GPU environments and is integrated in a readily accessible programming language (e.g., Julia language). With transparent GPU-to-GPU communication, JACC. Multi is optimized for scientific application workloads and is portable for NVIDIA and AMD accelerators. For the evaluation, we use two modern multi-GPU systems: Hudson, which features two NVIDIA H100 Hopper GPUs per node, and Frontier, which features four AMD MI250X GPUs per node, each with two Graphics Compute Dies (GCDs) for a total of eight GCDs per node. Additionally, as part of the evaluation, we use JACC (one GPU), MPI+JACC, and JACC. Multi codes that implement well-known and widely used scientific algorithms/kernels such as the conjugate gradient algorithm and an explicit forward Euler solver that requires GPU-to-GPU communication. Overall, JACC. Multi codes achieve better performance than MPI+JACC codes and significant speedups over JACC (one GPU), with up to 1.9× on Hudson and 6× on Frontier.

Valero Lara, Pedro [ORNL] (ORCID:0000000214794310)↗
DOE OSTI2025

A Study of Performance Portability of Low-bit Fused Matrix-Vector Multiplication Kernels in SYCL

Understanding the causes of performance gaps between a portable programming model and a vendor-specific programming model is important for improving performance portability. This paper studies performance portability of low-bit fused general matrix-vector multiplication kernels in SYCL on vendors’ graphics processing units (GPUs). This work introduces the use case, explains the kernel implementations in detail, evaluates the performance of the CUDA, HIP, and SYCL kernels on datacenter, desktop, and laptop GPUs, and investigates the causes of performance gaps. The results show that loop unrolling, kernel dispatch overhead, and sum reduction contribute to the gaps.

Jin, Zheming [ORNL] (ORCID:000000027197780X)↗
DOE OSTI2025

AMR-Wind: A Performance-Portable, High-Fidelity Flow Solver for Wind Farm Simulations

We present AMR-Wind, a verified and validated high-fidelity computational-fluid-dynamics code for wind farm flows. AMR-Wind is a block-structured, adaptive-mesh, incompressible-flow solver that enables predictive simulations of the atmospheric boundary layer and wind plants. It is a highly scalable code designed for parallel high-performance computing with a specific focus on performance portability for current and future computing architectures, including graphical processing units (GPUs). In this paper, we detail the governing equations, the numerical methods, and the turbine models. Establishing a foundation for the correctness of the code, we present the results of formal verification and validation. The verification studies, which include a novel actuator line test case, indicate that AMR-Wind is spatially and temporally second-order accurate. The validation studies demonstrate that the key physics capabilities implemented in the code, including actuator disk models, actuator line models, turbulence models, and large eddy simulation (LES) models for atmospheric boundary layers, perform well in comparison to reference data from established computational tools and theory. We conclude with a demonstration simulation of a 12-turbine wind farm operating in a turbulent atmospheric boundary layer, detailing computational performance and realistic wake interactions.

17 WIND ENERGY↗
DOE OSTI2025

Experience with the alpaka performance portability library in the CMS software

ion Library for Parallel Kernel Acceleration) is a header-only C++ library that provides performance portability across different back-ends, abstracting the underlying levels of parallelism. It supports serial and parallel execution on CPUs, and extremely parallel execution on NVIDIA, AMD and Intel GPUs.This contribution will show how alpaka is used in the CMS software to develop and maintain a single code base; to use different toolchains to build the code for each supported back-end, and link them into a single application; to seamlessly select the best backend at runtime, and implement portable reconstruction algorithms that run efficiently on CPUs and GPUs from different vendors. It will describe the validation and deployment of the alpaka-based implementation in the CMS High Level Trigger, and highlight how it achieves near-native performance.

Alawieh, Jaafar [CERN]↗
DOE OSTI2024

Development of a Performance Portable Non-Equilibrium Plasma Fluid Solver on Adaptive Grids

This presentation will describe the numerical techniques, programming paradigms, verification, and performance of a non-equilibrium plasma fluid solver that can effectively utilize current and upcoming central processing and graphics processing unit (CPU+GPU) architectures. Our plasma fluid model solves the conservation equations for self-consistent electrostatic Poisson, electron and heavy species transport, and electron temperature on adaptive Cartesian grids. Our solver is written using performance portable adaptive mesh management library, AMReX (Zhang et al., JOSS, 4 (37) 1370, 2019), and can be built and run on widely available vendor specific GPU architectures (NVIDIA/AMD/Intel). We utilize a non-subcycled second order semi-implicit time-stepping method where all adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) levels are advanced with the same time step. The composite multi-level multigrid solver from within AMReX is used for each of the governing equations that are cast into a Helmholtz equation form. We have also developed a python based chemical mechanism parser framework that uses a similar format as CANTERA (Goodwin et al., Zenodo, 2018) yaml files as input. Our custom parser reads the yaml file and provides C++ files with transport and production rate functions that can be executed on both host (CPU) and device (GPU). We present verification of our solver using method of manufactured solutions that indicate formal second order accuracy with central diffusion and fifth order weighted-essentially-non-oscillatory (WENO) advection scheme. We also verify our solver with published literature on low-pressure capacitive and high-pressure streamer discharges. Our initial performance studies indicate 10X speed-up using 20 NVIDIA GPUs versus 200 CPUs for an atmospheric streamer discharge problem solved on a 512 x 1024 x 512 grid.

graphics processing units↗
DOE OSTI2025

Performance Portability Evaluation of Fluid-Structure Interaction Simulations on Heterogeneous Platforms

The rapid proliferation of heterogeneous programming languages and multi-vendor hardware has underscored the critical need to evaluate the performance portability of scientific applications. In this work, we present the systematic porting and optimization of a massively parallel fluid-structure interaction code across multiple heterogeneous programming frameworks for deployment on leadership-class supercomputers from major vendors. Our analysis focuses on at-scale performance for simulations involving hundreds of millions of deformable cells, executed on a combination of CPUs and GPUs spanning thousands of nodes on exascale machines. We benchmark the performance of each implementation, highlighting the trade-offs inherent in adopting diverse programming models. Key insights regarding the portability of CUDA on multi-vendor platforms, the superior multi-core CPU performance from SYCL, and architectural considerations on performance optimization are distilled from our experience, offering guidance to other users of high performance computing based on our findings.

Martin, Aristotle [Duke University]↗