LLVM-HPC2018: The Fifth Workshop on the LLVM Compiler Infrastructure in HPC

Challenges of C++ Heterogeneous Programming Using SYCL Implementation Experience: the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse

Authors: Victor Lomuller (Codeplay Software Ltd)

Abstract: The C++ Direction Group has set a future direction for C++ and includes a guidance towards Heterogeneous C++. The introduction of the executors TS means for the first time in C++ there will be a standard platform for writing applications which can execute across a wide range of architectures including multi-core and many-core CPUs, GPUs, DSPs, and FPGAs.

The SYCL standard from the Khronos Group is a strong candidate to implement this upcoming C++ standard as are many other C++ frameworks from DOE, and HPX for the distributed case. One of SYCL's main strength is the capability to support constraint accelerator systems as it only requires OpenCL 1.2. One of the core ideas of the standard is that everything must be standard C++, the only exception being that some feature of C++ cannot be used in places that can be executed on an OpenCL device, often due to hardware limitation.

This paper presents some of the challenges and solutions to implement a Heterogeneous C++ standard in clang based on our implementation of Khrono's SYCL language with Codeplay's ComputeCpp compiler, with the fast growth of C++ and clang being a platform of choice to prototype many of the new C++ features.

We describe the major issues with ABI for separate compilation tool chain that comes from non-standard layout type of lambdas, as well as the issues of data addressing that comes from non-flat and possibly non-coherent address space.

We also describe various papers which are being proposed to ISO C++ to move towards standardizing heterogeneous and distributed computing in C++. The introduction of a unified interface for execution across a wide range of different hardware, extensions to this to support concurrent exception handling and affinity queries, and an approach to improve the capability of the parallel algorithms through composability. All of this adds up to a future C++ which is much more aware of heterogeneity and capable of taking advantage of it to improve parallelism and performance.




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