APPFIS: An Advanced Parallel Programming Framework for Iterative Stencil Based Scientific Applications in HPC Environments

Developing performant parallel applications for the distributed environment is challenging and requires expertise in both the HPC system and the application domain. We have developed a C++-based framework called APPFIS that hides the system complexities by providing an easy-to-use interface for developing performance portable structured grid-based stencil applications. APPFIS’s user interface is hardware agnostic and provides partitioning, code optimization, and automatic communication for stencil applications in distributed HPC environment. In addition, it offers straightforward APIs for utilizing multiple GPU accelerators, shared memory, and node-level parallelizations with automatic optimization for computation and communication overlapping. We have tested the functionality and performance of APPFIS using several applications on three platforms (Stampede2 at Texas Advanced Computing Center, Bridges-2 at Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center, and Summit Supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory). Experimental results show comparable performance to hand-tuned code with an excellent strong and weak scalability up to 4096 CPUs and 384 GPUs.