Kokkos 5.3 Release Briefing

Join the Kokkos team online on December 3rd for updates on the Kokkos community and the changes in Kokkos Core, Kokkos Kernels and Kokkos Tools 5.3.
Agenda Key Changes Kokkos Core Kokkos Core Deprecations and Incompatibilities Kokkos Kernels Kokkos Tools Slides and recording

The Kokkos Team is inviting you to the Kokkos 5.3 release briefing, which follows the 5.3.0 release of November 11th. The briefing will be held online on December 3rd, 2026 and will cover updates on the Kokkos community and changes in Kokkos Core, Kokkos Kernels and Kokkos Tools since 5.2.

  • When: December 3rd, 2026, 90 minutes
    • 9 AM MST
    • 11 AM EST
    • 5 PM CET
  • Where: online. Register to receive a calendar invite with the meeting details. (Click “Need an invite?”.)

Agenda  

  1. Community announcements, including the Kokkos User Group meeting 2027 in Montréal and its open call for submissions
  2. Kokkos Core 5.3
  3. Kokkos Kernels 5.3
  4. Kokkos Tools 5.3
  5. Questions and discussion

Key Changes  

Kokkos Tools is released in lockstep with Kokkos Core and Kokkos Kernels. The full change logs are available in the Kokkos Core , Kokkos Kernels and Kokkos Tools repositories.

Kokkos Core  

  • Kokkos::single: a new top-level parallel construct for executing non-parallel code on the device, optionally returning a value.
  • NextSilicon Backend: a new experimental backend supporting NextSilicon’s dataflow accelerator.
  • RangePolicy can be used like ThreadVectorRange at the third level of hierarchical parallelism (parallel_for only for now). The new Kokkos::Experimental::ThreadHandle provides the team rank and team size at that level.
  • Default memory spaces: new DefaultMemorySpace and DefaultHostMemorySpace type aliases.
  • New architectures: support for NVIDIA Rubin GPUs, NVIDIA Vera CPUs, Intel Battlemage (SYCL), NextSilicon Maverick-2, and Hygon DCU.
  • GPU performance: larger grid sizes for MDRangePolicy reductions on the CUDA and HIP backends, and a reduced device memory footprint for team scratch pads on SYCL.

Kokkos Core Deprecations and Incompatibilities  

  • The legacy View implementation has been removed.
  • All the code guarded by KOKKOS_ENABLE_DEPRECATED_CODE_4 has been removed.
  • View::size_type now follows the mdspan specification.
  • OpenACC backend: Clacc compiler support and AMD GPU support have been removed.

Kokkos Kernels  

  • Recursive Coordinate Bisection (RCB): improved algorithm on GPU.
  • LAPACK: added support for GETRF and GETRS.
  • Batched kernels: numerous new batched kernels, including SPR, SYMV, SYRK and L1 norm.

Kokkos Tools  

  • Minor bug fixes
  • Profiling interface update to support Kokkos::single

Slides and recording  

Slides and a recording will be posted on this page after the briefing.

On this page