Scalable Automatic Differentiation of Multiple Parallel Paradigms through Compiler Augmentation

Derivatives are key to numerous science, engineering, and machine learning applications. While existing tools generate derivatives of programs in a single language, modern parallel applications combine a set of frameworks and languages to leverage available performance and function in an evolving hardware landscape. We propose a scheme for differentiating arbitrary DAG-based parallelism that preserves scalability and efficiency, implemented into the LLVM-based Enzyme automatic differentiation framework. By integrating with a full-fledged compiler backend, Enzyme can differentiate numerous parallel frameworks and directly control code generation. Combined with its ability to differentiate any LLVM-based language, this flexibility permits Enzyme to leverage the compiler tool chain for parallel and differentiation-specitic optimizations. We differentiate nine distinct versions of the LULESH and miniBUDE applications, written in different programming languages (C++, Julia) and parallel frameworks (OpenMP, MPI, RAJA, Julia tasks, MPI.jl), demonstrating similar scalability to the original program. On benchmarks with 64 threads or nodes, we find a differentiation overhead of 3.4–6.8× on C++ and 5.4–12.5× on Julia.