A Generic Library for Stencil Computations

Abstract

In this era of diverse and heterogeneous computer architectures, the programmability issues, such as productivity and portable efficiency, are crucial to software development and algorithm design. One way to approach the problem is to step away from traditional sequential programming languages and move toward domain specific programming environments to balance between expressivity and efficiency. In order to demonstrate this principle, we developed a domain specific C++ generic library for stencil computations, like PDE solvers. The library features high level constructs to specify computation and allows the development of parallel stencil computations with very limited effort. The high abstraction constructs (like do_all and do_reduce) make the program shorter and cleaner with increased contextual information for better performance exploitation. The results show good performance from Windows multicores, to HPC clusters and machines with accelerators, like GPUs.