HALO 1.0: A Hardware-agnostic Accelerator Orchestration Framework for Enabling Hardware-agnostic Programming with True Performance Portability for Heterogeneous HPC

Hardware-agnostic programming with high performance portability will be the bedrock for realizing the ubiquitous adoption of emerging accelerator technologies in future heterogeneous high-performance computing (HPC) systems, which is the key to achieving the next level of HPC performance on an expanding accelerator landscape. In this paper, we present HALO 1.0, an open-ended extensible multi-agent software framework, that implements a set of proposed hardware-agnostic accelerator orchestration (HALO) principles and a novel compute-centric message passing interface (C2MPI) specification for enabling the portable and performance-optimized execution of hardware-agnostic application codes across heterogeneous accelerator resources. The experiment results of evaluating eight widely used HPC subroutines based on Intel Xeon E5-2620 v4 CPUs, Intel Arria 10 GX FPGAs, and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Ti GPUs show that HALO 1.0 allows the same hardware-agnostic application codes of the HPC kernels, without any change, to run across all the computing devices with a consistently maximum performance portability score of 1.0, which is 2x-861,883x higher than the OpenCL-based solution that suffers from an unstably low performance portability score.