alpaka - Abstraction Library for Parallel Kernel Acceleration

The alpaka library is a header-only C++20 abstraction library for accelerator development.

Disclaimer

This is a prototype implementation to evaluate different concepts for the host side API, Kernel language, ... The code is NOT production ready! Currently, I do not follow coding standards and provide updates via pull requests. It is possible that the development branch history is updated via force pushed.

Software License

alpaka is licensed under MPL-2.0.

Compile and Run

The recipies shown here assume you have installed spack packages for specific compiler versions and that alpaka is relative to the build folder available.

CMake variable naming and behaviour

• alpaka_DEP_* controls whether a parallelization framework is used and introduces a dependency on third-party libraries.
• alpaka_EXEC_* activates or deactivates which execution schemas will be used for examples.
  • Execution schemas can be set to OFF in CMake, but you can still use them within your application code.
  • Similarly, an execution schema can be set to ON, but it may not be usable in the application if the API where the executor can be used is deactivated.

compile for CPU only (serial and OpenMP)

spack load gcc@14.1.0
spack load cmake@3.29.1

# -Dalpaka_DEP_OMP=ON is implicitly set, if the compiler not support OpenMP only serial code will be generated
cmake ../alpaka -Dalpaka_TESTING=ON -Dalpaka_BENCHMARKS=ON -Dalpaka_EXAMPLES=ON -DBUILD_TESTING=ON
make -j
ctest --output-on-failure

compile for NVIDIA CUDA only

spack load cmake@3.29.1
spack load cuda@12.4.0

# use -DCMAKE_CUDA_ARCHITECTURES=80 to set the GPU architecture
cmake ../alpaka -Dalpaka_TESTING=ON -Dalpaka_BENCHMARKS=ON -Dalpaka_EXAMPLES=ON -Dalpaka_DEP_OMP=OFF -Dalpaka_DEP_CUDA=ON -Dalpaka_EXEC_CpuSerial=OFF  
make -j
ctest --output-on-failure

compile for AMD HIP only

spack load cmake@3.29.1
spack load hip@6.3.4
export CXX=clang++

# use -DCMAKE_HIP_ARCHITECTURES=gfx906 to set the GPU architecture
# for older CMake version sometimes the architecture must be set with -DAMDGPU_TARGETS=gfx906
cmake ../alpaka -Dalpaka_TESTING=ON -Dalpaka_BENCHMARKS=ON -Dalpaka_EXAMPLES=ON -Dalpaka_DEP_OMP=OFF -Dalpaka_DEP_HIP=ON -Dalpaka_EXEC_CpuSerial=OFF
make -j
ctest --output-on-failure

compile for OneApi SYCL CPU/GPU only

spack load cmake@3.29.1
spack load intel-oneapi-compilers@2025.0.4
spack load intel-oneapi-dpl@2022.2.0

# by default all device kinds get be addressed CPU and Intel GPU will be addressed
# You can add support for NVIDIA GPU and AMD GPU via
#  -Dalpaka_ONEAPI_AmdGpu=ON
#  -Dalpaka_ONEAPI_NvidiaGpu=ON
# or deselect the device kind with 
#  -Dalpaka_ONEAPI_Cpu=OFF
#  -Dalpaka_ONEAPI_IntelGpu=OFF
#
# The architecture can be set with -Dalpaka_ONEAPI_*_ARCH=<arch>
# Cpu ISA e.g. avx,avx2, avx512 
# Nvidia only the sm number is needed e.g. 80
# Amd full qualifier is required e.g. gfx906
cmake ../alpaka -DCMAKE_CXX_COMPILER=icpx -Dalpaka_TESTING=ON -Dalpaka_BENCHMARKS=ON -Dalpaka_EXAMPLES=ON -Dalpaka_DEP_ONEAPI=ON -Dalpaka_DEP_OMP=OFF -Dalpaka_EXEC_CpuSerial=OFF
make -j
ctest --output-on-failure

optimization for benchmarking

If you like to run benchmarks you should set at least the following CMake variables.

-DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release -DCMAKE_CXX_FLAGS="-ftree-vectorize -march=native"

You should best deselect the CPU executor CpuOmpBlocksAndThreads with -Dalpaka_EXEC_CpuOmpBlocksAndThreads=OFF. This executor is using nested parallelism and is very slow.

You can benchmark bableStream for different number of elements e.g. with a simple loop

for((i=1;i<10;++i)) ; do  ./benchmark/babelstream/babelstream --array-size=$((33554432 * $i)) --number-runs=100; done

Coding

General

All methods and classes in the alpaka namespace can be called from the controller thread (named host) and from the compute device.

• alpaka::onHost can only be called from host.
• alpaka::onAcc can only be called from within a kernel running on the compute device.

Methods starting with onHost::make (e.g., onHost::makeHostDevice()) create handles to instances where the copy is only a shallow copy and not a deep copy.
Methods starting with get (e.g., onHost::getExtents(...)) provide access to properties of an instance.

alpaka provides for generic access to objects properties free functions. Most free functions that can be called from host can be found under onHost.hpp.
Functions callable from within a compute kernel can be found under onAcc.hpp.

A central class for M-dimensional extents, offsets, and indices is Vec.
There are two types of index vectors: Vec, which supports constexpr usage, but when moved around, it stores the information in a runtime instance, and CVec, which is a compile-time index vector that stores the indices in the template signature.
Passing an instance of CVec into a function or kernel will retain the full compile-time knowledge.
Performing calculations like addition, subtraction, etc., with a CVec will result in losing the full compile-time knowledge, and the results will be of type Vec.

alpaka is designed so that explicit usage of types is reduced to a minimum.
Most objects should be created with factories (e.g., onHost::makeDeviceSelector(api::host, deviceKind::cpu)) and using tags (empty C++ structs), such as api::host, api::cuda, instead of the tag type.

Host Side Objects

alpaka provides APIs that can be used to generate platforms and query devices.
The following APIs are available:

api::host
api::cuda
api::hip
api::oneApi

APIs except api::host often introduce third-party library dependencies (e.g., CUDA, ROCm or OneApi). You can de/activate these in CMake via alpaka_DEP_*.

Executors describe how compute threads will be executed and mapped to the hierarchy of grids, blocks, and threads. They can be controlled in CMake via alpaka_EXEC_*. Disabling an executor in CMake only changes which executors will be used for examples, tests, and benchmarks. For example, if you disable alpaka_EXEC_CpuSerial in CMake, you can still enqueue kernels that use the serial executor.

queue.enqueue(exec::cpuSerial, Vec{3}, Vec{1}, kernel, 42);

An executor is not usable with all device queues. You can check this with onHost::isExecutorSupportedBy(exec::cpuSerial, device).

A good starting point for learning how to use alpaka is the tutorial example.