RAJA¶

RAJA is a collection of C++ software abstractions, being developed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), that enable architecture portability for HPC applications. The overarching goals of RAJA are to:

Make existing (production) applications portable with minimal disruption
Provide a model for new applications so that they are portable from inception.

(Text taken from RAJA README.)

The main conceptual abstraction in RAJA is a loop. A typical large multiphysics code may contain O(10K) loops and these are where most computational work is performed and where most fine-grained parallelism is available. RAJA defines a systematic loop encapsulation paradigm that helps insulate application developers from implementation details associated with software and hardware platform choices. Such details include: non-portable compiler and platform-specific directives, parallel programming model usage and constraints, and hardware-specific data management. (Text taken from RAJA Primer.)

RAJA implements three primary encapsulations: execution policies, IndexSets, and data type encapsulation. The execution policy instructs the compiler regarding how the loop should execute and/or parallelized. IndexSets describe how the loop iteration space is traversed, e.g., stride-1, stride-2, tiled, etc. Data type encapsulation describes where and how the data is located in memory, e.g., its alignment on cache line boundaries, and aliasing properties.

An example loop which adds two vectors, ported to RAJA and parallelized with OpenMP, is shown below (taken from the RAJA examples):

/*
  RAJA::omp_parallel_for_exec - executes the forall loop using the
  #pragma omp parallel for directive
*/
RAJA::forall<RAJA::omp_parallel_for_exec>
  (RAJA::RangeSegment(0, N), [=](RAJA::Index_type i) {
    C[i] = A[i] + B[i];
  });

where RangeSegment(0, N) generates a sequential list of numbers from 0 to N. The same loop parallelized and executed on a GPU with CUDA looks similar:

RAJA::forall<RAJA::cuda_exec<CUDA_BLOCK_SIZE>>
  (RAJA::RangeSegment(0, N), [=] __device__(RAJA::Index_type i) {
    C[i] = A[i] + B[i];
  });
checkSolution(C, N);

RAJA¶

Benefits and Challenges¶

Benefits¶

Challenges¶