Transformation of application enablement tools on CORAL systems

Abstract

The CORAL project exhibits an important shift in the computational paradigm from homogeneous to heterogeneous computing, where applications run on both the CPU and the accelerator (e.g., GPU). Existing applications optimized to run only on the CPU have to be rewritten to adopt accelerators and retuned to achieve optimal performance. The shift in the computational paradigm requires application development tools (e.g., compilers, performance profilers and tracers, and debuggers) change to better assist users. The CORAL project places a strong emphasis on open-source tools to create a collaborative environment in the tools community. In this article, we discuss the collaboration efforts and corresponding challenges to meet the CORAL requirements on tools and detail three of the challenges that required the most involvement. A usage scenario is provided to show how the tools may help users adopt the new computation environment and understand their application execution and the data flow at scale.