Benchmarking a portable lattice quantum chromodynamics kernel written in Kokkos and MPI.

Simulations of Lattice Quantum Chromodynamics (LQCD) are an important application (two digit percentage of cycles) on major High Performance Computing (HPC) installations, including systems high up on and leading the top500 list. In the rapidly changing hardware landscape of HPC, tying up manpower optimizing simulation software for every architecture becomes a sustainability issue. In this work we explore the feasibility of using performance portable parallel code for an important LQCD kernel. Fusing the Kokkos C++ Performance Portability EcoSystem with MPI allows applications to scale on massive parallel machines while still being able to target a plentitude of different architectures with the same simple code. We report on benchmarking results for a range of currently deployed and recently introduced systems, including AMD EPYC 7742, AMD MI250, Fujitsu A64FX, Nvidia A100 and Nvidia H100 components, with mostly encouraging results.