A survey of software implementations used by application codes in the Exascale Computing Project

• Published in: The international journal of high performance computing applications Vol. 36; no. 1; pp. 5 - 12
• Main Authors: Evans, Thomas M, Siegel, Andrew, Draeger, Erik W, Deslippe, Jack, Francois, Marianne M, Germann, Timothy C, Hart, William E, Martin, Daniel F
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: London, England SAGE Publications 01-01-2022; SAGE PUBLICATIONS, INC
• Subjects: Applications programs; C++ (programming language); Co-design; Computation; Graphics processing units; High level languages; Software; Exascale Computing Project; graphical processing unit; computational physics applications; programming models
• ISSN: 1094-3420; 1741-2846
• DOI: 10.1177/10943420211028940

The US Department of Energy Office of Science and the National Nuclear Security Administration initiated the Exascale Computing Project (ECP) in 2016 to prepare mission-relevant applications and scientific software for the delivery of the exascale computers starting in 2023. The ECP currently supports 24 efforts directed at specific applications and six supporting co-design projects. These 24 application projects contain 62 application codes that are implemented in three high-level languages—C, C++, and Fortran—and use 22 combinations of graphical processing unit programming models. The most common implementation language is C++, which is used in 53 different application codes. The most common programming models across ECP applications are CUDA and Kokkos, which are employed in 15 and 14 applications, respectively. This article provides a survey of the programming languages and models used in the ECP applications codebase that will be used to achieve performance on the future exascale hardware platforms.