Kokkos 3: Programming Model Extensions for the Exascale Era

As the push towards exascale hardware has increased the diversity of system architectures, performance portability has become a critical aspect for scientific software. We describe the Kokkos Performance Portable Programming Model that allows developers to write single source applications for diverse high-performance computing architectures. Kokkos provides key abstractions for both the compute and memory hierarchy of modern hardware. We describe the novel abstractions that have been added to Kokkos version 3 such as hierarchical parallelism, containers, task graphs, and arbitrary-sized atomic operations to prepare for exascale era architectures. We demonstrate the performance of these new features with reproducible benchmarks on CPUs and GPUs.

Automated summary

This article introduces the Kokkos Performance Portable Programming Model, which allows developers to write single source applications for diverse high-performance computing architectures. Kokkos provides key abstractions for the compute and memory hierarchy of modern hardware and demonstrates the performance of new features for exascale-era architectures.