HLSF: A High-Level; C++-Based Framework for Stencil Computations on Accelerators

Abstract

The development of programs for modern systems with GPUs and other accelerators is a complex and error-prone task. The popular GPU programming approaches like CUDA and OpenCL require a deep knowledge of the underlying architecture to achieve good performance. We present HLSF -- a high-level framework that greatly simplifies the development of stencil-based applications on systems with accelerators. The main novel features of HLSF are as follows: 1) it provides a high-level interface for stencils that hides from the programmer the low-level management of the parallelism and memory on accelerators; 2) it allows the developer to write programs in the pure C++ style, using all convenient features of the most recent C++14 standard. Our experimental evaluation shows that the framework significantly reduces the programming effort for stencil-based applications, while delivering performance competitive to CUDA and OpenCL.