Solving Maxwell's Equations with Modern C++ and SYCL: A Case Study

Afzal A, Schmitt C, Alhaddad S, Grynko Y, Teich J, Förstner J, Hannig F (2018)

Publication Language: English

Publication Type: Conference contribution, Conference Contribution

Publication year: 2018

Publisher: IEEE

Pages Range: 49-56

Conference Proceedings Title: Proceedings of the 29th Annual IEEE International Conference on Application-specific Systems, Architectures and Processors (ASAP)

Event location: Politecnico di Milano, Milan IT

ISBN: 978-1-5386-7479-6

URI: https://www12.cs.fau.de/downloads/schmittch/publications/ASAGTFH18asap.pdf

DOI: 10.1109/ASAP.2018.8445127

Abstract

In scientific computing, unstructured meshes are a crucial foundation for the simulation of real-world physical phenomena. Compared to regular grids, they allow resembling the computational domain with a much higher accuracy, which in turn leads to more efficient computations.
There exists a wealth of supporting libraries and frameworks that aid programmers with the implementation of applications working on such grids, each built on top of existing parallelization technologies. However, many approaches require the programmer to introduce a different programming paradigm into their application or provide different variants of the code. SYCL is a new programming standard providing a remedy to this dilemma by building on standard C ++17 with its so-called single-source approach: Programmers write standard C ++ code and expose parallelism using C++17 keywords. The application is
then transformed into a concrete implementation by the SYCL implementation. By encapsulating the OpenCL ecosystem, different SYCL implementations enable not only the programming of CPUs but also of heterogeneous platforms such as GPUs or other devices. For the first time, this paper showcases a SYCL-based solver for the nodal Discontinuous Galerkin method for Maxwell’s equations on unstructured meshes. We compare our solution to a previous C-based implementation with respect to programmability and performance on heterogeneous platforms.

Authors with CRIS profile

Ayesha Afzal Lehrstuhl für Informatik 12 (Hardware-Software-Co-Design) Christian Schmitt Lehrstuhl für Informatik 12 (Hardware-Software-Co-Design) Jürgen Teich Lehrstuhl für Informatik 12 (Hardware-Software-Co-Design) Frank Hannig Lehrstuhl für Informatik 12 (Hardware-Software-Co-Design)

Related research project(s)

Domänenspezifische Programmierung und zielplattformbewusste Compiler-Infrastruktur für Algorithmen auf unstrukturierten Gittern (HighPerMeshes) April 1, 2017 - Sept. 30, 2020

How to cite

APA:

Afzal, A., Schmitt, C., Alhaddad, S., Grynko, Y., Teich, J., Förstner, J., & Hannig, F. (2018). Solving Maxwell's Equations with Modern C++ and SYCL: A Case Study. In Proceedings of the 29th Annual IEEE International Conference on Application-specific Systems, Architectures and Processors (ASAP) (pp. 49-56). Politecnico di Milano, Milan, IT: IEEE.

MLA:

Afzal, Ayesha, et al. "Solving Maxwell's Equations with Modern C++ and SYCL: A Case Study." Proceedings of the The 29th Annual IEEE International Conference on Application-specific Systems, Architectures and Processors (ASAP), Politecnico di Milano, Milan IEEE, 2018. 49-56.

BibTeX: Download