Packaging HEP Heterogeneous Mini-apps for Portable Benchmarking and Facility Evaluation on Modern HPCs

TL;DR

This paper presents a containerized, automated approach for deploying heterogeneous HEP mini-apps on modern HPCs, enabling efficient benchmarking and evaluation of evolving hardware and software environments.

Contribution

It introduces turn-key deployment methods using containerization and Spack to simplify and automate benchmarking of HEP mini-apps across diverse HPC facilities.

Findings

Automated deployment reduces manual effort in benchmarking.

Containerization enables portable and reproducible testing environments.

Performance tracking over time facilitates hardware and software evaluation.

Abstract

High Energy Physics (HEP) experiments are making increasing use of GPUs and GPU dominated High Performance Computer facilities. Both the software and hardware of these systems are rapidly evolving, creating challenges for experiments to make informed decisions as to where they wish to devote resources. In its first phase, the High Energy Physics Center for Computational Excellence (HEP-CCE) produced portable versions of a number of heterogeneous HEP mini-apps, such as \ptor, FastCaloSim, Patatrack and the WireCell Toolkit, that exercise a broad range of GPU characteristics, enabling cross platform and facility benchmarking and evaluation. However, these mini-apps still require a significant amount of manual intervention to deploy on a new facility. We present our work in developing turn-key deployments of these mini-apps, where by means of containerization and automated configuration and build techniques such as Spack, we are able to quickly test new hardware, software, environments and entire facilities with minimal user intervention, and then track performance metrics over time.