Peppher: Performance Portability and Programmability for Heterogeneous Many-Core Architectures

Book chapter, 2017

© 2017 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved. PEPPHER takes a pluralistic and parallelization agnostic approach to programmability and performance portability for heterogeneous many-core architectures. The PEPPHER framework is in principle language independent but focuses on supporting C++ code with PEPPHER-specific annotations as pragmas or external annotations. The framework is open and extensible; the PEPPHER methodology details how new architectures are incorporated. The PEPPHER methodology consists of rules for how to extend the framework for new architectures. This mainly concerns adaptivity and autotuning for algorithm libraries, the necessary hooks and extensions for the run-time system and any supporting algorithms and data structures that this relies on. Offloading is a specific technique for programming heterogeneous platforms that can sometimes be applied with high efficiency. Offload as developed by the PEPPHER partner Codeplay is a particular, nonintrusive C++ extension allowing portable C++ code to support diverse heterogeneous multicore architectures in a single code base.