A Beginner’s Guide to Estimating and Improving Performance Portability

Given the increasing diversity of multi- and many-core processors, portability is a desirable feature of applications designed and implemented for such platforms. Portability is unanimously seen as a productivity enabler, but it is also considered a major performance blocker. Thus, performance portability has emerged as the property of an application to preserve similar form and similar performance on a set of platforms; a first metric, based on extensive evaluation, has been proposed to quantify performance portability for a given application on a set of given platforms.