Experiences Supporting DPC++ in AMReX

AMReX is a software framework for massively parallel, block-structured adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) applications. AMReX is developed as part of the United States Department Of Energy’s Exascale Computing Project (ECP). Besides AMR capabilities, AMReX also provides a parallel programming framework for numerous applications including six ECP projects, and it implements several backends for CPU-GPU heterogeneous computing. In this talk, we present our experiences supporting DPC++, a language based on the SYCL specification as a backend for AMReX. We will demonstrate how AMReX provides an abstraction layer for its users so that they can write performance portable code for a variety of heterogeneous platforms. We will discuss key DPC++ features that allow AMReX to implement the abstractions and our contributions to the oneAPI specification and Intel’s implementation. We will also highlight some features missing in SYCL/DPC++ that limits its efficiency and our future plans.