A Best Paper Award has been given to the authors Matthias Noack (ZIB, left), Florian Wende (ZIB, middle), Georg Zitzlsberger (Intel Deutschland), Michael Klemm (Intel Deutschland, right) and Thomas Steinke (ZIB) for their paper contribution "KART - A Runtime Compilation Library for Improving HPC Application Performance" at the ISC'17 IXPUG Workshop "Experiences on Intel Knights Landing at the One Year Mark", Frankfurt/M, June 2017.
The paper describes an approach to enable the use of problem dependent runtime information for the compilation of performance critical code sections (kernels) of an application package. Traditionally, information that is only available at runtime, e.g. input-specific constants, cannot be leveraged for better compiler optimisation, although it often determines loop counts, branching predicates and paths, as well as memory-access patterns. It can also be crucial for generating efficient SIMD-vectorized code, especially relevant for the many-core architectures paving the way to exascale computing. With KART, a C++ library solution closes this gap, by allowing developers to compile, link, and execute code (e.g., C, C++, Fortran) at application runtime. The KART library supports the flexible use of any command line compiler. Related techniques, like auto-tuning and code-generation can be directly integrated into a KART-enabled application instead of being scripted around the code.
The awarded paper is a result of the collaboration between the Algorithms for Innovative Architectures group at ZIB and Intel Deutschland within the activities of ZIB's "Research Center for Manycore High-Performance Computing", the Intel Parallel Computing Center (IPCC) at ZIB. The paper will be published in the Workshop Proceedings of the ISC’17 Conference.
