Kokkos in SPARC: Performance Portability Experiences in a CFD Application

Speaker: Travis Fisher, Sandia National Laboratories
April 11, 2024

Presentation

Abstract

The Sandia Parallel Aerodynamics & Reentry Code (SPARC) application is one of Sandia National Laboratories’ exascale demonstration applications. The application focuses on computational fluid dynamics for high-speed flows and contains various modeling fidelities to predict aerodynamic heating, forces, and vibrational loading for hypersonic and reentry problems. In this talk, we demonstrate SPARC’s performance portability on CPU only, CPU+threads, and CPU+GPU systems for a representative problem and highlight how SPARC achieves performance portability using Kokkos and performance portable linear solvers available in Trilinos. In particular, we focus on how SPARC exposes parallelism for threaded platforms, manages field and temporary data for different hardware and discretizations, and abstracts portable execution to improve developer productivity.

Biography

Travis Fisher is a Principal Member of Technical Staff at Sandia National Laboratories in the Computational Thermal and Fluids Department, primarily working as a developer on the SPARC application, Sandia’s performance-portable hypersonic computational fluid dynamics application. Travis’s technical interests include numerical methods for high-speed flows, nonlinear solver techniques, application design, code coupling, and high-performance computing. Travis received his PhD in Mechanical Engineering from Purdue University in 2012. Prior to joining Sandia in 2012, he worked as a Co-op student at NASA Langley Research Center contributing to high-order methods for compressible flows.

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