Automated Generation of High-Performance Computational Fluid Dynamics Codes

Abstract

Domain-Specific Languages (DSLs) improve programmers productivity by decoupling problem descriptions from algorithmic implementations. However, DSLs for High-Performance Computing (HPC) have two additional critical requirements: performance and scalability. This paper presents the automated process of generating, from abstract mathematical specifications of Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) problems, optimised parallel codes that perform and scale as manually optimised ones. We consciously combine within Saiph, a DSL for solving CFD problems, low-level optimisations and parallelisation strategies, enabling high-performance single-core executions which effectively scale to multi-core and distributed environments. Our results demonstrate how high-level DSLs can offer competitive performance by transparently leveraging state-of-the-art HPC techniques.