TECH-X CORPORATION — Department of Energy SBIR Phase I: 02c

Description

Statement of the problem or situation that is being addressed throughout Phase I of your proposal Modern computer hardware relies heavily on parallelism, concurrency, vectorization, and heterogeneity to achieve high performance. Software that is not able to exploit these hardware characteristics is limited to a minuscule fraction of the theoretical peak performance of a computer, be it a large supercomputer, a workstation, or a laptop. Therefore, performance portability of software is now a critical (but nontrivial aspect of hardening R&D codes for industrial use. This Phase I proposal proposes methods for achieving performance portability in VSim, a DOE funded research code for electromagnetic particle-in-cell simulations. General statement of how this problem is being addressed We will develop computational kernels tuned for speci c target computer hardware including the Intel Xeon Phi coprocessor as well as modern CPUs. We will develop Software to automatically dispatch computations to the most appropriate kernels for the hardware available to the end user. What is to be done in Phase I? During Phase I we will develop a mechanism for detecting available computer hardware and the hardware characteristics at runtime. We will optimize core computational kernels for electromagnetic solvers for the Intel Xeon Phi and CPUs. Base on the detected hardware, computation is then dispatched to the most appropriate kernel. From the user perspective, this will lead to automatic performance portability on a wide variety of hardware. We will quantify the performance improvements through performance measurements, pro ling, and benchmarking. Commercial applications and other bene ts The performance improvements and ease of use achieved through this project will lead to faster turnaround times for simulations. This will have a positive impact on the productivity of computer aided engineering (CAE) users. In addition, the improved performance facilitate qualitatively new applications of the VSim simulation software including design optimization. Key words Intel Xeon Phi, Performance optimization, Vectorization, Parallelism, Heterogeneous computing, Next gen- eration hardware. Summary for Members of Congress Tech-X Corporation will develop software that runs optimally on a a wide spectrum of modern computer hardware to enable computer aided engineering and scienti c research.