Performance portable parallel programming of heterogeneous stencils across shared-memory platforms with modern Intel processors

Abstract

In this work, we take up the challenge of performance portable programming of heterogeneous stencil computations across a wide range of modern shared-memory systems. An important example of such computations is the Multidimensional Positive Definite Advection Transport Algorithm (MPDATA), the second major part of the dynamic core of the EULAG geophysical model. For this aim, we develop a set of parametric optimization techniques and four-step procedure for customization of the MPDATA code. Among these techniques are: islands-of-cores strategy, (3+1)D decomposition, exploiting data parallelism and simultaneous multithreading, data flow synchronization, and vectorization. The proposed adaptation methodology helps us to develop the automatic transformation of the MPDATA code to achieve high sustained scalable performance for all tested ccNUMA platforms with Intel processors of last generations. This means that for a given platform, the sustained performance of the new code is kept at a similar level, independently of the problem size. The highest performance utilization rate of about 41–46% of the theoretical peak, measured for all benchmarks, is provided for any of the two-socket servers based on Skylake-SP (SKL-SP), Broadwell, and Haswell CPU architectures. At the same time, the four-socket server with SKL-SP processors achieves the highest sustained performance of around 1.0–1.1 Tflop/s that corresponds to about 33% of the peak.