  We describe a set of lower-level abstractions to improve performance on
modern large scale heterogeneous systems. These provide portable access to
system- and hardware-dependent features, automatically apply dynamic
optimizations at run time, and target stencil-based codes used in finite
differencing, finite volume, or block-structured adaptive mesh refinement
codes.
  These abstractions include a novel data structure to manage refinement
information for block-structured adaptive mesh refinement, an iterator
mechanism to efficiently traverse multi-dimensional arrays in stencil-based
codes, and a portable API and implementation for explicit SIMD vectorization.
  These abstractions can either be employed manually, or be targeted by
automated code generation, or be used via support libraries by compilers during
code generation. The implementations described below are available in the
Cactus framework, and are used e.g. in the Einstein Toolkit for relativistic
astrophysics simulations.
