ArborX: A Performance Portable Geometric Search Library

TL;DR

ArborX is an open-source, performance portable C++ library for geometric searches optimized for modern supercomputers, demonstrating scalable algorithms and broad hardware compatibility.

Contribution

It introduces a new scalable, performance portable geometric search library with efficient algorithms and a flexible interface for supercomputing architectures.

Findings

Achieves high performance on CPUs and GPUs

Outperforms existing libraries like Boost.Geometry.Index and nanoflann

Demonstrates scalability and portability across hardware architectures

Abstract

Searching for geometric objects that are close in space is a fundamental component of many applications. The performance of search algorithms comes to the forefront as the size of a problem increases both in terms of total object count as well as in the total number of search queries performed. Scientific applications requiring modern leadership-class supercomputers also pose an additional requirement of performance portability, i.e. being able to efficiently utilize a variety of hardware architectures. In this paper, we introduce a new open-source C++ search library, ArborX, which we have designed for modern supercomputing architectures. We examine scalable search algorithms with a focus on performance, including a highly efficient parallel bounding volume hierarchy implementation, and propose a flexible interface making it easy to integrate with existing applications. We demonstrate the performance portability of ArborX on multi-core CPUs and GPUs, and compare it to the state-of-the-art libraries such as Boost.Geometry.Index and nanoflann.