The Arch Project: Physics Mini-Apps for Algorithmic Exploration and Evaluating Programming Environments on HPC Architectures

The arch project is a suite of mini-apps that have been developed with consistent coding practices, under a common infrastructural layer. Great emphasis has been placed on making the applications concise and easy to manipulate, while capturing the key performance characteristics of their proxied algorithmic classes. The suite is intended for traditional exploration of performance, portability and productivity on modern HPC architectures, but also introduces the potential for focussing on those characteristics of production application stacks that are not generally exposed with isolated mini-app developments. In this paper we discuss the implementation of each of the mini-apps, and present key findings from the development and optimisation process, alongside details of important future research directions.

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