A Holistic Systems Approach to Leveraging Heterogeneity

Abstract

Increasingly, HPC developers are turning to heterogeneity to continue to achieve the performance they desire. Leveraging heterogeneity however is challenging. While an increasing number of applications are starting to gain advantage from heterogeneity, there remains much work before it sees widespread productive use.We believe that a holistic systems approach encompassing both hardware and software is the best path towards productively leveraging heterogeneity. In this paper, we describe the key attributes of a successful hardware approach from a node and system perspective. At the node level, it is important to have components that are pluggable and easily combined in a tightly-coupled manner. From the systems perspective, it is important to ensure resources can be composed in a manner that minimizes unused ("stranded") resources.We describe the importance of a complementary software approach that provides a single development environment, high-lighting the value of software being able to handle heterogeneity from node through system. We detail the vision of oneAPI that addresses these challenges, the resultant programming model, and the advantages for applications.