[ogb-discuss] Performance Wrappers Project Proposal

[Brad Lewis]

This is a proposal for a Performance Wrappers Project.  The
project is sponsored by the HPC Developer Community.


Short Name
  Performance Wrappers

Sponsorsing Communities
  HPC Developer

Initial participants
  Theresa Do
  Dave Hagerty
  Paul Hinker
  Tim Jacobson
  Shandong Lao
  Brad Lewis
  Jeremy Week

Description:

I propose a wrappers project that would provide common interfaces that 
are not available for Solaris but have equivalent existing functionality 
that can be utilized in a simple wrapper implementation. An example is 
Fast Fourier Transforms. Sun Studio 12 provides FFTs in Sun Performance 
Library using FFTPACK interfaces.  Another common FFT interface is FFTW. 
FFTW interfaces would make it possible for existing applications that 
call FFTW to compile and run with Studio 12.  CBLAS is another set of 
wrappers that would be useful to include. In this case the standard 
package is a set of wrappers that call Fortran BLAS. However, string 
arguments are handled in a way that is not compatible with Sun Studio 12 
because string lengths are not passed into Fortran subroutines. A Sun 
Studio compliant CBLAS would be useful.  The goal is to make it very 
easy for HPC Developers to compile and run on Solaris without having to 
rewrite their code, recompile whole packages, or write wrappers of there 
own for Solaris.