Enhancing build-portability for scientific applications across heterogeneous platforms

The paper addresses the build problem in the HPC arena that results from heterogeneity in hardware architectures, system software, and application build systems. We propose a new approach that generalizes current build systems, and enhances their portability across heterogeneous high-end platforms. Although the original application build system needs to be modified it is a one-time activity that allows us to extract target platform specific information and store it into profiles. Our toolkit exploits profiles to retrieve appropriate target-specific information during the actual build process. Our developed mechanism termed late binding enables dynamic concretization of platform-specific variables from profiles. This approach simplifies the build process for heterogeneous environments, promotes profile reuse, and improves its portability. In order to verify our approach in practice we have applied our methodology to a production molecular dynamics code (the CPMD application).