NHR PerfLab Seminar: Kokkos: Getting lucky by design (September 24, online)
Title: Kokkos: Getting lucky by design
Speaker: Christian Trott, Co-leader of the Kokkos core team, Sandia National Laboratories
Date and time: Tuesday, September 24, 2024, 4.00 p.m. CEST
Abstract
Achieving widespread adoption of a software project involves a lot of luck: You have to have the right idea at the right time, find sponsors willing to fund adoption efforts, and be blessed with early adopters who help you widen the appeal of your product instead of tailoring it to their specific needs. But a core part of finding adoption is to start with an API design that takes into account the primary hurdles users encounter when relying on third-party packages. This talk will introduce Kokkos, with a focus on its design principles and how they help with usability, maintainability and productivity for Kokkos’s users. Kokkos is a programming model designed for performance portability that addresses the difficulty of developing and maintaining applications that can efficiently use all the diverse sets of HPC platforms, both CPU- and GPU-based systems. It has found widespread adoption, both in the US Department of Energy National Laboratories – where Kokkos is arguably the leading programming system for GPU systems – and in the general HPC community, with developers from more than 150 institutions being counted as Kokkos users. Besides discussing the contribution of design principles to Kokkos’s success, this talk will also provide insight into the role the development of a developer and user community has played.
Short bio
Christian Trott is a high performance computing expert with extensive experience in designing and implementing software for modern HPC systems. He is a principal member of staff at Sandia National Laboratories, where he co-leads the Kokkos core team developing performance portability solutions for engineering and science applications. Christian is also the head of Sandia’s delegation to the ISO C++ standards committee and a principal author of C++ standard features such as mdspan and linear algebra support. He also serves as an adviser to numerous application teams, helping them redesign their codes using Kokkos and achieve performance portability for the next generation of supercomputers. In the past, Christian contributed significantly to numerous scientific software projects, such as Trilinos and LAMMPS. He earned a doctorate from the University of Technology Ilmenau in theoretical physics with a focus on computational materials research.
For a list of past and upcoming NHR PerfLab seminar events, see: https://hpc.fau.de/research/nhr-perflab-seminar-series/