Between Tuesday 16th and Friday 19th of May Durham HPC Days was held in the Department of Computer Science at Durham University. A focus session was held on ExCALIBUR and specifically the novel hardware that has been made availble as part of the ExCALIBUR H&ES programme. However, novel hardware is of little use if scientific software developers are unable to programme it, and therefore xDSL gave a talk on our efforts to improve the field of Domain Specific Languages by developing a common ecosystem.
We described how MLIR and LLVM are ideal to solving the problems around siloed DSL ecosystems, before highlighting how xDSL enables DSL developers to construct a thin abstraction layer atop our Python based ecosystem. Some of our work on the PSyclone and Devito DSLs was then discussed, with the point being that whilst these DSLs are very different, for instance PSyclone is Fortran based whereas Devito is Python based, they can still leverage the same underlying compiler infrastructure and when running on ARCHER2 we observe performance benefits and significant code level reductions compared to their existing bespoke compilers.
The workshop was a fanstastic event, with a series of very interesting talks from a wide ranging audience and it was very useful for us to gain feedback from them around our existing and planned activities.