The OpenACC organization represents a vibrant community of public and private institutions spanning academia, supercomputing and research center, national laboratories and industries who place priority on accelerated, high-performance computing. Integral to the organization's activities is the stewardship of a well-established directive-based programming model, OpenACC, designed to provide an easy on-ramp to parallel computing on CPUs, GPUs and other devices. This programming model has been created with regular feedback from this diverse community of users, while keeping usability and productive performance in mind.
The model targets x86, Arm, and OpenPOWER CPUs, NVIDIA and AMD GPUs, the PEZY-SC manycore processor, and FPGAs. Current discussions include: (i) Overcoming technical challenges to support and migrate HPC apps to the next generation of HPC platforms, (ii) Progress of open-source implementations (i.e., GCC and LLVM) and vendor-supported implementations (i.e., HPE and NVIDIA) of the OpenACC specification, especially in light of more and more diverse HPC architectures coming online, (iii) Collaborating with ISO language standards to support parallelization natively without directives.
With over 200 applications choosing OpenACC, its ever-growing user community enjoys more time available for science and less time spent on programming. OpenACC fosters a cross-platform API complementary to, and interoperable with, OpenMP, MPI, CUDA, and OpenCL. Applications ported to GPUs using OpenACC include Quantum Espresso, NWChem, Nek5000/NekCEM, CASTRO, Gaussian, ANSYS, ICON, and VASP, among other top HPC applications. Over time, the organization’s membership is increasingly placing emphasis on achieving high performance and effective portability through the ISO standard languages with the OpenACC specification maintaining currency with the ISO language parallel standards.
This interactive BoF will bring together the research and developer communities to discuss successes, challenges, and brainstorm new feature requests, clarifications of definitions and implementations of existing features, and ideas for future direction. The direction of the standard is heavily driven by OpenACC users/application developers. Feedback includes new feature requests or clarifications to existing ones. Current activities include clarifications and feedback to the latest features of the standard as well as their implementation from the various compilers.
Additionally, the topic of Hackathons and HPC skill building has always kindled a vibrant conversation among BOF attendees who are either seeking help to accelerate their codes or are interested in either hosting similar hackathons or sending teams to such events in order to increase accelerated computing proficiency, increase compute resource utilization, and augment more traditional training and education modalities. Since SC14, over 550 mini-apps and applications spanning astrophysics, climate modeling, nuclear physics and quantum chemistry have been ported to large scale machines via hackathons held around the globe. Hackathons represent a global network (Asian, Europe, North and South America) of parallel computing expert advocates and motivated teams for focused, advanced training and hand-on experience guided by expert mentors.
OpenACC User Experience, Hackathons, Vendor Reaction, Relevance, and Roadmap
Agenda: TBD