Evaluating the Performance Portability of SYCL across CPUs and GPUs on Bandwidth-Bound Applications

Reguly, István Zoltán (2023) Evaluating the Performance Portability of SYCL across CPUs and GPUs on Bandwidth-Bound Applications. In: Proceedings of the SC ’23 Workshops of The International Conference on High Performance Computing, Network, Storage, and Analysis. Association for Computing Machinery, New York, pp. 1038-1047. ISBN 979-8-4007-0785-8

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Abstract

In this paper, we evaluate the portability of the SYCL programming model on some of the latest CPUs and GPUs from a wide range of vendors, utilizing the two main compilers: DPC++ and hipSYCL/OpenSYCL. Both compilers currently support GPUs from all three major vendors; we evaluate performance on the Intel(R) Data Center GPU Max 1100, the NVIDIA A100 GPU, and the AMD MI250X GPU. Support on CPUs currently is less established, with DPC++ only supporting x86 CPUs through OpenCL, however, OpenSYCL does have an OpenMP backend capable of targeting all modern CPUs; we benchmark the Intel Xeon Platinum 8360Y Processor (Ice Lake), the AMD EPYC 9V33X (Genoa-X), and the Ampere Altra platforms. We study a range of primarily bandwidth-bound applications implemented using the OPS and OP2 DSLs, evaluate different formulations in SYCL, and contrast their performance to “native” programming approaches where available (CUDA/HIP/OpenMP). On GPU architectures SCYL on average even slightly outperforms native approaches, while on CPUs it falls behind - highlighting a continued need for improving CPU performance. While SYCL does not solve all the challenges of performance portability (e.g. needing different algorithms on different hardware), it does provide a single programming model and ecosystem to target most current HPC architectures productively.

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