High-level Abstractions for Performance, Portability and Continuity of Scientific Software on Future Computing Systems

In this report we present research on applying a domain specific high-level abstractions development strategy with the aim to “future-proof “ a key class of high performance computing (HPC) applica-tions that simulate hydro-dynamics computations at AWE plc. We build on an existing high-level abstraction framework, OPS, that is being developed for the solution of multi-block structured mesh-based applications at the University of Oxford. The target application, is an unclassified benchmark application, CloverLeaf, that consists of algorithms of interest from the hydro-dynamics workload at AWE plc. OPS uses an “active library ” approach where a single application code written using the OPS API can be transformed into different parallel implementations which can then be linked against the appropriate parallel library enabling execution on different back-end hardware platforms. At the same time the generated code and the platform specific back-end libraries are highly optimized utilizing the best low-level features of a target architecture to make an OPS application achieve near-optimal performance including high computational efficiency and minimized memory traffic. We present (1) the conversion of CloverLeaf to utilize OPS, (2) the utilization of OPS’s cod