Preparing Ginkgo for AMD GPUs – A Testimonial on Porting CUDA Code to HIP

With AMD reinforcing their ambition in the scientific high performance computing ecosystem, we extend the hardware scope of the Ginkgo linear algebra package to feature a HIP backend for AMD GPUs. In this paper, we report and discuss the porting effort from CUDA, the extension of the HIP framework to add missing features such as cooperative groups, the performance price of compiling HIP code for AMD architectures, and the design of a library providing native backends for NVIDIA and AMD GPUs while minimizing code duplication by using a shared code base.