Open SYCL on heterogeneous GPU systems: A case of study

Computational platforms for high-performance scientific applications are becoming more heterogenous, including hardware accelerators such as multiple GPUs. Applications in a wide variety of scientific fields require an efficient and careful management of the computational resources of this type of hardware to obtain the best possible performance. However, there are currently different GPU vendors, architectures and families that can be found in heterogeneous clusters or machines. Programming with the vendor provided languages or frameworks, and optimizing for specific devices, may become cumbersome and compromise portability to other systems. To overcome this problem, several proposals for high-level heterogeneous programming have appeared, trying to reduce the development effort and increase functional and performance portability, specifically when using GPU hardware accelerators. This paper evaluates the SYCL programming model, using the Open SYCL compiler, from two different perspectives: The performance it offers when dealing with single or multiple GPU devices from the same or different vendors, and the development effort required to implement the code. We use as case of study the Finite Time Lyapunov Exponent calculation over two real-world scenarios and compare the performance and the development effort of its Open SYCL-based version against the equivalent versions that use CUDA or HIP. Based on the experimental results, we observe that the use of SYCL does not lead to a remarkable overhead in terms of the GPU kernels execution time. In general terms, the Open SYCL development effort for the host code is lower than that observed with CUDA or HIP. Moreover, the SYCL version can take advantage of both CUDA and AMD GPU devices simultaneously much easier than directly using the vendor-specific programming solutions.