Trilinos: Enabling Scientific Computing Across Diverse Hardware Architectures at Scale

2025-03-11

AI Summary

Large-scale, multiphysics, multiscale scientific simulations face significant challenges in achieving both performance portability and software maintainability across heterogeneous hardware (CPUs, GPUs, and accelerators). Method: This project designs and implements an open-source software framework built upon the Kokkos ecosystem. Leveraging C++17+ template metaprogramming and a modular product-domain architecture, it integrates MPI-based distributed parallelism with a unified GPU abstraction layer to enable high-performance computing across diverse architectures. Continuous integration and community-driven development ensure scalability and collaborative evolution. Contribution/Results: The framework has enabled数十 (dozens of) national-level scientific applications, demonstrating efficient scalability on million-core heterogeneous systems. It substantially reduces adaptation effort for emerging hardware, improves code reuse, and enhances long-term software maintainability.

Technology Category

• Machine Learning: Hardware-aware ML
• Data Mining & Knowledge Management: Scalability, Parallel & Distributed Systems
• Constraint Satisfaction and Optimization: Distributed CSP/Optimization

Application Category

• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Experiences and lessons learnt from Web-based algorithms and system deployments
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: User modeling and simulation for interactive and conversational systems
• Graph Algorithms and Modeling for the Web: Efficient manipulation of static and dynamic Web-related graphs

Abstract

Trilinos is a community-developed, open-source software framework that facilitates building large-scale, complex, multiscale, multiphysics simulation code bases for scientific and engineering problems. Since the Trilinos framework has undergone substantial changes to support new applications and new hardware architectures, this document is an update to ``An Overview of the Trilinos project'' by Heroux et al. (ACM Transactions on Mathematical Software, 31(3):397-423, 2005). It describes the design of Trilinos, introduces its new organization in product areas, and highlights established and new features available in Trilinos. Particular focus is put on the modernized software stack based on the Kokkos ecosystem to deliver performance portability across heterogeneous hardware architectures. This paper also outlines the organization of the Trilinos community and the contribution model to help onboard interested users and contributors.

Problem

• Enables large-scale, multiscale, multiphysics simulations for scientific problems.
• Supports performance portability across diverse hardware architectures.
• Facilitates community-driven development and user onboarding in Trilinos.

Innovation

• Open-source framework for large-scale scientific simulations
• Modernized software stack using Kokkos ecosystem
• Supports performance portability across diverse hardware