arXiv subjects

Ami Marowka

Publications and source records attributed to Ami Marowka.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Evaluating SYCL as a Unified Programming Model for Heterogeneous Systems

High-performance computing (HPC) applications are increasingly executed in heterogeneous environments, introducing new challenges for programming and software portability. SYCL has emerged as a leading model designed to simplify heterogeneous programming and make it more accessible to developers. Intended as a single-source, cross-platform parallel programming framework, SYCL promises portability, productivity, and performance across a variety of architectures. However, these goals have not been consistently defined or realized, leaving developers with varying expectations. This paper addresses this gap by evaluating SYCL from the perspective of application developers. We analyze whether SYCL meets essential criteria for cross-platform development, including code portability, development productivity, and runtime efficiency. Our evaluation draws on benchmarks and illustrative examples and focuses on SYCL's memory management and parallelism abstractions. We provide detailed comparisons between Unified Shared Memory (USM) and buffer-accessor approaches, as well as between NDRange and hierarchical kernel models. In addition to presenting our own benchmark results on Intel platforms, we synthesize findings from recent studies across multiple SYCL implementations and compilers. Our results expose key limitations and inconsistencies in current SYCL implementations and offer insights into the steps needed to improve the framework's reliability and cross-platform usability.

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arXiv2024

Portability Efficiency Approach for Calculating Performance Portability

The emergence of heterogeneity in high-performance computing, which harnesses under one integrated system several platforms of different architectures, also led to the development of innovative cross-platform programming models. Along with the expectation that these models will yield computationally intensive performance, there is demand for them to provide a reasonable degree of performance portability. Therefore, new tools and metrics are being developed to measure and calculate the level of performance portability of applications and programming models. The ultimate measure of performance portability is performance efficiency. Performance efficiency refers to the achieved performance as a fraction of some peak theoretical or practical baseline performance. Application efficiency approaches are the most popular and attractive performance efficiency measures among researchers because they are simple to measure and calculate. Unfortunately, the way they are used yields results that do not make sense, while violating one of the basic criteria that defines and characterizes the performance portability metrics. In this paper, we demonstrate how researchers currently use application efficiency to calculate the performance portability of applications and explain why this method deviates from its original definition. Then, we show why the obtained results do not make sense and propose practical solutions that satisfy the definition and criteria of performance portability metrics. Finally, we present a new performance efficiency approach called portability efficiency, which is immune to the shortcomings of application efficiency and substantially improves the aspect of portability when calculating performance portability.

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arXiv2023

Toward Open Repository of Performance Portability of Applications, Benchmarks and Models

The adoption of heterogeneous computing systems based on diverse architectures to achieve exascale computing power has worsened the performance portability problem of scientific applications that were designed to run on these platforms. To cope with the challenges posed by supercomputing, new performance portability frameworks have been developed alongside advanced methods and metrics to evaluate the performance portability of heterogeneous applications. However, many studies have shown that the new methods and metrics do not produce coherent results which yield clear conclusions that are required for designing the hardware and software architectures of tomorrow's supercomputing systems. We outline a proposal to establish an open repository of performance portability of applications, benchmarks and models which will be standardized, objective, and based on strict operating and reporting guidelines. Such guidelines will ensure a fair, comparable and meaningful measure of the performance portability while the requirement for a detailed disclosure of the obtained results and the configuration settings will ensure the reproducibility of the reported results.

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