HPSF Conference 2025

Kokkos is a programming model for writing performance portable applications for all major high performance computing platforms. It provides abstractions for data management and common parallel operations, allowing developers to write portable high performance code with minimal knowledge of architecture-specific details. Kokkos is implemented as a heavily-templated C++ library. However, C++ is not ideal for rapid prototyping and quick algorithmic exploration. An increasing number of developers use Python for scientific computing, machine learning, and data analytics. In this talk, I will present a new Python framework, PyKokkos, for writing performance portable applications entirely in Python. PyKokkos provides Kokkos-like abstractions that are easier to use and more concise than the C++ interface. We implemented PyKokkos by building a translator from a subset of Python to C++ Kokkos and bridging necessary function calls via automatically generated Python bindings. I will also cover our recent work on automatic kernel fusion with the goal to optimize PyKokkos applications. The talk will also cover our experience on developing PyKokkos, its current limitations, and future plans.