Multi Environment Template API (META)

As HPC systems continue to increase in heterogeneity performance portability becomes a universal challenge for application developers who wish to extract the performance that can come from machine specific features. Across academia, government and industry, multiple template metaprogramming techniques have been widely deployed to assist with the abstraction of the varying hardware elements found on today’s systems. While these metaprogramming techniques can prove effective, the use of them introduces a additional source of heterogeneity. A critical element in extracting performance for a given system is the existence of performance analysis tools- these tools are frequently tied to a particular vendor or architecture and, increasingly, also a particular template metaprogramming library. The use of these libraries introduces a new requirement that performance analysis and debug tools must be created for each library. The META effort proposes a universal tooling interface that is able to provide an application developer with the ability to operate across multiple template metaprogramming libraries. META will maximize programmer efficiency by leveraging LLVM Clang interfaces that analyze code structure, syntax, parallel scalable and memory performance using state of the art techniques. To further enhance productivity, we will export our interfaces to one or more cross-platform graphical integrated development environments (IDEs) giving developers a robust environment to begin targeting the META interfaces. Performance portability is a cross-cutting problem as developers need to port code across multiple platforms - be they different HPC centers or cloud-computing providers. The tools that enable performance analysis are frequently tied to a single vendor, by breaking that dependence sophisticated performance analysis tools may be created and stood up faster when a new machine is procured. This decreases the time to maximum utilization of a new system and allows developers the opportunity to expand the capability of their applications while extracting full performance from a system.