Performance and Portability with OpenCL for Throughput-Oriented HPC Workloads across Accelerators, Coprocessors, and Multicore Processors

Ever since accelerators and coprocessors became the mainstream hardware for throughput-oriented HPC workloads, various programming techniques have been proposed to increase productivity in terms of both the performance and ease-of-use. We evaluate these aspects of OpenCL on a number of hardware platforms for an important subset of dense linear algebra operations that are relevant to a wide range of scientific applications. Our findings indicate that OpenCL portability has improved since our previous publication and many new and surprising usage scenarios are possible that rival those available after decades of software development on the CPUs. The combined performance-portability metric, even though not promised by the OpenCL standard, reflects the need for tuning performance-critical operations during the porting process and we show how a large portion of the available efficiency is lost if the tuning is not done correctly.