The Landscape and Challenges of HPC Research and LLMs

Recently, language models (LMs), especially large language models (LLMs), have revolutionized the field of deep learning. Both encoder-decoder models and prompt-based techniques have shown immense potential for natural language processing and code-based tasks. Over the past several years, many research labs and institutions have invested heavily in high-performance computing, approaching or breaching exascale performance levels. In this paper, we posit that adapting and utilizing such language model-based techniques for tasks in high-performance computing (HPC) would be very beneficial. This study presents our reasoning behind the aforementioned position and highlights how existing ideas can be improved and adapted for HPC tasks.

OMPGPT: A Generative Pre-trained Transformer Model for OpenMP

Large language models (LLMs), as epitomized by models like ChatGPT, have revolutionized the field of natural language processing (NLP). Along with this trend, code-based large language models such as StarCoder, WizardCoder, and CodeLlama have emerged, trained extensively on vast repositories of code data. Yet, inherent in their design, these models primarily focus on generative tasks like code generation, code completion, and comment generation, and general support for multiple programming languages. While the generic abilities of code LLMs are useful for many programmers, the area of high-performance computing (HPC) has a narrower set of requirements that make a smaller and more domain-specific LM a smarter choice. This paper introduces OMPGPT, a novel model meticulously designed to harness the inherent strengths of language models for OpenMP pragma generation. Furthermore, we adopt and adapt prompt engineering techniques from the NLP domain to create chain-of-OMP, an innovative strategy designed to enhance OMPGPT's effectiveness. Our extensive evaluations demonstrate that OMPGPT outperforms existing large language models specialized in OpenMP tasks and maintains a notably smaller size, aligning it more closely with the typical hardware constraints of HPC environments. We consider our contribution as a pivotal bridge, connecting the advantage of language models with the specific demands of HPC tasks. The success of OMPGPT lays a solid foundation, suggesting its potential applicability and adaptability to a wider range of HPC tasks, thereby opening new avenues in the field of computational efficiency and effectiveness.

CompCodeVet: A Compiler-guided Validation and Enhancement Approach for Code Dataset

Large language models (LLMs) have become increasingly prominent in academia and industry due to their remarkable performance in diverse applications. As these models evolve with increasing parameters, they excel in tasks like sentiment analysis and machine translation. However, even models with billions of parameters face challenges in tasks demanding multi-step reasoning. Code generation and comprehension, especially in C and C++, emerge as significant challenges. While LLMs trained on code datasets demonstrate competence in many tasks, they struggle with rectifying non-compilable C and C++ code. Our investigation attributes this subpar performance to two primary factors: the quality of the training dataset and the inherent complexity of the problem which demands intricate reasoning. Existing "Chain of Thought" (CoT) prompting techniques aim to enhance multi-step reasoning. This approach, however, retains the limitations associated with the latent drawbacks of LLMs. In this work, we propose CompCodeVet, a compiler-guided CoT approach to produce compilable code from non-compilable ones. Diverging from the conventional approach of utilizing larger LLMs, we employ compilers as a teacher to establish a more robust zero-shot thought process. The evaluation of CompCodeVet on two open-source code datasets shows that CompCodeVet has the ability to improve the training dataset quality for LLMs.