Lessons Learned from Accelerating Quicksilver on Programmable Integrated Unified Memory Architecture (PIUMA) and How That's Different from CPU.
Jesmin Jahan Tithi, Fabrizio Petrini, David F. Richards · ISC · 2021
Quicksilver represents key elements of the Mercury Monte Carlo Particle Transport simulation software developed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL). Mercury is one of the applications used in the Department of Energy (DOE) for nuclear security and nuclear reactor simulations. Thus Quicksilver, as a Mercury proxy, influences DOE’s hardware procurement and co-design activities. Quicksilver has a complicated implementation and performance profile: its performance is dominated by latency-bound table look-ups and control flow divergence that limit SIMD/SIMT parallelization opportunities. Therefore, obtaining high performance for Quicksilver is quite challenging.