APerOL Minisymposium
Andrey Alekseenko, PDC
The third “Application Perspective on SYCL” (APerOL) minisymposium took place on the 18th of June at the Platform for Advanced Scientific Computing 2025 (PASC25) conference in Brugg, Switzerland. The minisymposium was organised by Andrey Alekseenko and Szilárd Páll from PDC with speakers representing a diverse range of institutions and disciplines: Peter Thoman (University of Innsbruck), Markus Büttner (University of Bayreuth), Kevin Harms (Argonne National Laboratory), and Timothée David-Cléris (Grenoble Alpes University).
Aligning with the conference’s theme of how supercomputing can be utilised to help address the seventeen UN Sustainable Development Goals ( sdgs.un.org/goals ), the minisymposium demonstrated SYCL’s role in addressing three critical sustainability challenges: accessibility through broader hardware compatibility, energy efficiency by enabling optimal hardware selection, and long-term sustainability through reduced code maintenance and enhanced reusability across increasingly diverse hardware landscapes.
Application developers shared compelling success stories in areas including computational chemistry, astrophysics, and coastal modelling. Highlights included near-exascale performance of the Shamrock Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) code on NVIDIA, AMD, and Intel GPUs; coastal simulation framework portability from CPUs to Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGAs); challenges and successes maintaining the NWChemEx computational chemistry code on top US Department of Energy (DOE) supercomputers; and productivity improvements offered by the Celerity distributed programming framework.
The event fostered a collaborative atmosphere with lively discussions between researchers and the audience. This spirit of collaboration and idea exchange demonstrated growing momentum behind open standards in scientific computing, positioning portable programming models as essential tools for addressing global challenges through computational science.
The presentations from the event are available, along with the presentations from the previous two APerOL minisymposia, at kth-pdc.github.io/aperol .