HALO 1.0: A Hardware-agnostic Accelerator Orchestration Framework for Enabling Hardware-agnostic Programming with True Performance Portability for Heterogeneous HPC
This framework addresses the problem of achieving true performance portability for hardware-agnostic programming on heterogeneous HPC systems, which is a significant challenge for developers and researchers in high-performance computing.
This paper introduces HALO 1.0, a framework that enables hardware-agnostic host applications to run with performance portability across heterogeneous accelerators. It achieves a performance portability score up to five orders of magnitude higher than OpenCL-based solutions for eight HPC subroutines on CPUs, FPGAs, and GPUs.
This paper presents HALO 1.0, an open-ended extensible multi-agent software framework that implements a set of proposed hardware-agnostic accelerator orchestration (HALO) principles. HALO implements a novel compute-centric message passing interface (C^2MPI) specification for enabling the performance portable execution of a hardware-agnostic host application across heterogeneous accelerators. The experiment results of evaluating eight widely used HPC subroutines based on Intel Xeon E5-2620 CPUs, Intel Arria 10 GX FPGAs, and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Ti GPUs show that HALO 1.0 allows for a unified control flow for host programs to run across all the computing devices with a consistently top performance portability score, which is up to five orders of magnitude higher than the OpenCL-based solution.