HPSF Conference 2025

Personal computing devices sold today increasingly include AI hardware accelerators such as neural processing units and graphics cards with compute capability. However, scientific libraries packaged for laptop and desktop computers focus first on broad instruction set compatibility. Yet, hardware optimized libraries and behaviors can be applied at runtime as widely used by Intel MPI environmental variables. This session discusses the unique use case of the R package system for vendor neutral hardware acceleration using vendor agnostic SYCL / Kokkos. The goal is to allow scientific package developers to quickly and easily write vendor independent accelerator code with deep control and tuning capabilities that use hardware acceleration capabilities as well on laptop / desktop machines as HPC clusters. Although R is specifically discussed, ideas from this session translate to Python and other high-level language packages used in scientific computing. Additionally, this session raises technical challenges directly using Kokkos as well as Apptainer for continuous integration that would greatly benefit from early-stage feedback of those audience members at this conference.