Agentic workflow ports legacy Fortran to portable Kokkos C++
The point
Researchers present an agentic workflow that ports Fortran kernels to portable Kokkos C++. Specialized LLM agents translate, validate, compile, test, debug and optimize without human intervention.
Why it matters
It offers HPC teams a way to modernize legacy code for GPUs without manual porting.
Key details
- Evaluated over five runs per configuration on an NVIDIA A100, including a production climate model kernel
- GPT-5 and o4-mini-high completed it most reliably, beating Fortran baselines for a few US dollars
- Open weights models handled simpler kernels but struggled with parallel reductions and hierarchical parallelism
Original ~25 min → 25 sec here Source: arXiv cs.AI, Oct 29, 2026