A Practical, SCVM-based Approach to Enhance Portability and Adaptability of HPC Application Build Systems

We describe a novel, based on ’system-call virtual machine’ (SCVM), approach to enhancing portability of the HPC application deployment process across heterogeneous high-end machines. Our approach to portable builds is based on the insertion of toolkit-interpretable directives into original application build scripts. Modifications resulting from those directives preserve the semantics of the original build instruction flow. The execution of the build script is controlled by our toolkit that intercepts build script commands in a manner transparent to the enduser. In order to intercept script commands we utilize strace system calls. We applied this approach to a scientific production code (Gamess-US) on the Cray-XT5 machine.