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We are delighted and proud to have been awarded the Hans Meuer award at ISC 2021. The Hans Meuer Award honors the most outstanding research paper submitted to the conference’s Research Papers Committee. The award was introduced in memory of the late Dr. Hans Meuer, general chair of the ISC conference from 1986 through 2014, and co-founder of the TOP500 project.

The award is for the paper “A Performance Analysis of Modern Parallel Programming Models Using a Compute-Bound Application”, authored by Andrei Poenaru, Wei-Chen Lin and Simon McIntosh-Smith, all from the University of Bristol’s HPC Research Group. You can view the slides from the talk and the paper in either local or remote form. A short interview with the authors is available on YouTube, while the full talk, presented by the lead author, Andrei Poenaru, is available via the ISC website (registration may be required).

The paper investigates the efficacy of various parallel programming languages for a compute-intensive molecular docking code. We explored OpenMP, SYCL, Kokkos, and a range of low-level languages, across a diverse range of HPC CPUs and GPUs. Results showed that it’s possible to write highly performance portable compute bound codes, though there is still room for improvement in the performance that cross-platform standards can achieve, relative to low-level or proprietary approaches.

To cite this paper, please use:

Andrei Poenaru, Wei-Chen Lin and Simon McIntosh-Smith, “A Performance Analysis of Modern Parallel Programming Models Using a Compute-Bound Application”. In International Conference on High Performance Computing, LNCS volume 12728, (pp. 332-350). Springer, Cham., June 2021.

Performance portability is a major research theme for the Bristol group. To find our other performance portability related paper, we recommend Google Scholar.

Simon McIntosh-Smith, Professor of High Performance Computing, Head of the HPC Research Group, University of Bristol. Follow @simonmcs on Twitter for more news from the HPC research group in Bristol.

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