Virtual Institute — High Productivity Supercomputing

ParCo Minisymposium on Scalability and Usability of HPC Programming Tools

Date

Sep 5, 2007

Location

At the ParCo Conference 2007 in Aachen/Jülich

Abstract

Facing increasing power dissipation and little instruction-level parallelism left to exploit, computer architects are realizing further performance gains by placing multiple "slower" processor cores on a chip rather than by building faster uni-processors. As a consequence, numerical simulations are being required to harness much higher degrees of parallelism in order to satisfy their growing demand for computing power. However, writing code that runs correctly and efficiently on large numbers of processors and cores is extraordinarily challenging and requires adequate tool support for debugging and performance analysis. Unfortunately, increased concurrency levels place higher scalability demands not only on applications but also on software tools. When applied to larger numbers of processors, familiar tools often cease to work in a satisfactory manner (e.g., due to escalating memory requirements or limited I/O bandwidth). In addition, tool usage is often complicated and requires the user to learn a separate interface. This minisymposium will serve as a forum to discuss methods and experiences related to scalability and usability of HPC programming tools, including their integration with compilers and the overall development environment.

Agenda

10:00-12:00

  • Benchmarking the Stack Trace Analysis Tool for BlueGene/L
    Gregory L. Lee, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory [PDF]
  • Scalable, Automated Performance Analysis with TAU and PerfExplorer
    Kevin A. Huck, University of Oregon [PDF]
  • Developing Scalable Applications with Vampir
    Matthias S. Müller, Technische Universität Dresden [PDF]

14:00-15:30

  • Scalable Collation and Presentation of Call-Path Profile Data with CUBE
    Markus Geimer, Forschungszentrum Jülich [PDF]
  • Coupling DDT and Marmot for Debugging of MPI Applications
    Bettina Krammer, HLRS - High Performance Computing Center Stuttgart [PDF]
  • Compiler Support for Efficient Profiling and Tracing
    Barbara Chapman, University of Houston [PDF]

16:00-17:30

  • Comparing Intel Thread Checker and Sun Thread Analyzer
    Christian Terboven, RWTH Aachen University [PDF]
  • Continuous Runtime Profiling of OpenMP Applications
    Karl Fürlinger, University of Tennessee [PDF]
  • Understanding Memory Access Bottlenecks on Multi-core
    Josef Weidendorfer, Technische Universität München [PDF]

Location

Forschungszentrum Jülich, JSC, Rotunde

Programm Committee

  • Felix Wolf, Forschungszentrum Jülich (chair)
  • Daniel Becker, Forschungszentrum Jülich
  • Bettina Krammer, University of Stuttgart
  • Allen Malony, University of Oregon
  • Dieter an Mey, RWTH Aachen University
  • Shirley Moore, University of Tennessee
  • Matthias Müller, Technical University of Dresden
  • Martin Schulz, Lawrence Livermore National Lab