Analyzing the Performance Portability of SYCL across CPUs, GPUs, and Hybrid Systems with Protein Database Search

The high-performance computing (HPC) landscape is undergoing rapid transformation, with an increasing emphasis on energy-efficient and heterogeneous computing environments. This comprehensive study extends our previous research on SYCL's performance portability by evaluating its effectiveness across a broader spectrum of computing architectures, including CPUs, GPUs, and hybrid CPU-GPU configurations from NVIDIA, Intel, and AMD. Our analysis covers single-GPU, multi-GPU, single-CPU, and CPU-GPU hybrid setups, using the SW\# protein database search application as a case study. The results demonstrate SYCL's versatility across different architectures, maintaining comparable performance to CUDA on NVIDIA GPUs while achieving similar architectural efficiency rates on most CPU configurations. Although SYCL showed excellent functional portability in hybrid CPU-GPU configurations, performance varied significantly based on specific hardware combinations. Some performance limitations were identified in multi-GPU and CPU-GPU configurations, primarily attributed to workload distribution strategies rather than SYCL-specific constraints. These findings position SYCL as a promising unified programming model for heterogeneous computing environments, particularly for bioinformatic applications.