Taking GPU Programming Models to Task for Performance Portability

Portability is critical to ensuring high productivity in developing and maintaining scientific software as the diversity in on-node hardware architectures increases. While several programming models provide portability for diverse GPU platforms, they don't make any guarantees about performance portability. In this work, we explore several programming models -- CUDA, HIP, Kokkos, RAJA, OpenMP, OpenACC, and SYCL, to study if the performance of these models is consistently good across NVIDIA and AMD GPUs. We use five proxy applications from different scientific domains, create implementations where missing, and use them to present a comprehensive comparative evaluation of the programming models. We provide a Spack scripting-based methodology to ensure reproducibility of experiments conducted in this work. Finally, we attempt to answer the question -- to what extent does each programming model provide performance portability for heterogeneous systems in real-world usage?