A Metric for Performance Portability

TL;DR

This paper introduces a clear definition and a simple metric for performance portability, enabling objective comparison of application performance across diverse hardware platforms.

Contribution

It provides a precise definition and a quantifiable metric for performance portability, addressing the lack of consensus and vagueness in previous discussions.

Findings

The metric accurately captures performance and portability across platforms.

Application of the metric to previous work demonstrates its utility.

The approach clarifies and quantifies performance portability.

Abstract

The term "performance portability" has been informally used in computing to refer to a variety of notions which generally include: 1) the ability to run one application across multiple hardware platforms; and 2) achieving some notional level of performance on these platforms. However, there has been a noticeable lack of consensus on the precise meaning of the term, and authors' conclusions regarding their success (or failure) to achieve performance portability have thus been subjective. Comparing one approach to performance portability with another has generally been marked with vague claims and verbose, qualitative explanation of the comparison. This paper presents a concise definition for performance portability, along with a simple metric that accurately captures the performance and portability of an application across different platforms. The utility of this metric is then demonstrated with a retroactive application to previous work.