Hi Chapel User Community —
At the OpenSHMEM 2021 workshop today, there were some questions from the audience about running Chapel and Arkouda on a new 'open-science' system being procured that features Nvidia GPUs and ARM-based CPUs. It was proposed that we kick off a thread in the public community to continue the discussion, so this post is intended to be a place for that, for those who are interested in chiming in or contributing.
Next week's Chapel 1.25 release will feature a nice step forward in terms of code generation from Chapel to Nvidia GPUs, though it's definitely still early days in that effort. Jim Dinan and Oscar Hernandez from Nvidia have offered to serve as friendly faces (time permitting) when we have Nvidia questions or challenges around best practices as we continue to wrestle with that effort going forward [tagging @e-kayrakli, @stonea, @diten, @mppf, and @mstrout who are heading up that effort].
Chapel support for ARM is generally in good shape, though after the Q&A wrapped up, @ronawho reminded me that Qthreads is currently lacking native assembly context switches, which can affect performance for applications that rely heavily on task-switching in performance-critical sections. For the Chapel aggregators we were describing today, this would most likely show up in processing the 'on-clauses' (active messages) that implement Chapel's aggregators' flushBuffer() operations. If that ends up being the case, we should check with the Sandia team to see where this is on their roadmap.
Also mentioned in the discussion was a possible opportunity to rewrite a new Astrophysics code from scratch. That will likely ultimately deserve a thread of its own, but I thought I'd mention it here while we're spinning this conversation up, and tag @npadmana (Yale Astrophysics Professor and Chapel enthusiast) since it may catch his interest (though I recognize that Astrophysics is a big and diverse field).
That's my opening summary, where I've tried to err on the side of vagueness to not call anyone or anything out prematurely. Others who are interested in this topic and effort should feel encouraged to introduce themselves and provide additional detail, as appropriate.
Thanks,
-Brad
