Performance portable C++ programming with RAJA

With the rapid change of computing architectures, and variety of programming models; the ability to develop performance portable applications has become of great importance. This is particularly true in large production codes where developing and maintaining hardware specific versions is untenable.

To simplify the development of performance portable code, we introduce RAJA, our C++ library that allows developers to write single-source applications that can target multiple hardware and programming model back-ends. We provide a thorough introduction to all of RAJA features, and walk through some hands-on examples that will allow attendees to understand how RAJA might benefit their own applications. Attendees should bring a laptop computer to participate in the hands-on exercises.

This tutorial will introduce attendees to RAJA, a C++ library for developing performance portable applications. Attendees will learn how to write performance portable code that can execute on a range of programming models (OpenMP, CUDA, Intel TBB, and HCC) and hardware (CPU, GPU, Xeon Phi).

Specifically, attendees will learn how to convert existing C++ applications to use RAJA, and how to use RAJA's programming abstractions to expose existing parallelism in their applications without complex algorithm rewrites. We will also cover specific guidelines for using RAJA in a large application, including some common "gotchas" and how to handle memory management. Finally, attendees will learn how to categorize loops to allow for simple and systematic performance tuning on any architecture.