Projects

Scalasca – Scalable Performance Analysis of Large-Scale Parallel Applications

Scalasca is a long-term umbrella project to which many of our activities contribute. It is an open-source toolset developed in cooperation with the Jülich Supercomputing Centre that can be used to analyze the performance behavior of parallel applications and to identify opportunities for optimization. It has been specifically designed for use on large-scale systems, but is also well-suited for small- and medium-scale HPC platforms. Scalasca integrates runtime summaries with in-depth studies of concurrent behavior via event tracing. A distinctive feature is its ability to identify wait states that occur, for example, as a result of unevenly distributed workloads. More

HOPSA – Holistic Performance System Analysis

The EU project HOPSA in the framework of the EU-Russia Coordinated Call sets out to create an integrated diagnostic infrastructure for combined application and system tuning – with the former being under EU and the latter being under Russian responsibility. Starting from system-wide basic performance screening of individual jobs, an automated workflow will route findings on po-tential bottlenecks either to system administrators or application developers with recommendations on how to identify their root cause using more powerful diagnostic tools. More

G8 ECS – Enabling Climate Simulation at Extreme Scale

The objective of the G8 ECS project, which is locally funded by the DFG in the framework of the G8 Research Councils Initiative on Multilateral Research (Interdisciplinary Program on Application Software towards Exascale Computing), is to investigate how to run efficiently climate simulations on future Exascale systems. It focuses on three main topics: (i) how to complete simulations with correct results despite frequent system failures, (ii) how to exploit hierarchical computers with hardware accelerators close to their peak performance and (iii) how to run efficient simulations with 1 billion threads. More

EESI – European Exascale Software Initiative

The goal of the European Exascale Software Initiative (EESI) is to build a European vision and roadmap to address the challenge of the new generation of massively parallel systems composed of millions of heterogeneous cores which will provide Petaflop performances in 2010 and Exaflop performances in 2020. Supercomputers are used for highly calculation-intensive tasks such as problems involving quantum physics, weather forecasting, climate research, molecular modeling, physical simulations. A particular class of problems, known as Grand Challenge problems, are problems whose full solution requires semi-infinite computing resources. More

PRIMA – Performance Refactoring of Instrumentation, Measurement, and Analysis Technologies for Petascale Computing

This DOE-funded project pursues the goal of reengineering core components of the two performance-analysis systems TAU, developed by the University of Oregon, and Scalasca for evolution to petascale and beyond. Building on a long history of interaction between the two projects, the two key activities are 1) refactoring certain TAU and Scalasca components for core code sharing, and 2) integrating their functionality more effectively through data interfaces, formats, and utilities. More

SILC – Scalable Infrastructure for the Automated Performance Analysis of Parallel Codes

Funded by the German Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), the goal of this project is the design and implementation of a scalable and easy-to-use performance measurement infrastructure for supercomputing applications as a basis for several existing performance-analysis tools developed by partner institutions, including Scalasca. This enhanced tool suite will be used to tune the performance of academic and industrial simulation programs. More

VI-HPS – Virtual Institute High Productivity Supercomputing

Funded by the Helmholtz Association, the mission of the Virtual Institute - High Productivity Supercomputing is to improve the quality and accelerate the development process of complex simulation programs in science and engineering that are being designed for the most advanced parallel computer systems. For this purpose, seven partners in Germany and the US are developing and integrating state-of-the-art programming tools for high-performance computing that assist domain scientists in diagnosing programming errors and optimizing the performance of their applications. Besides the purely technical development of programming tools, the virtual institute also offers training workshops with guided hands-on training in the effective use of the tools. More

AICES – Aachen Institute for Advanced Study in Computational Engineering Science

The Graduate School Aachen Institute for Advanced Study in Computational Engineering Science (AICES) is a new doctoral program established at RWTH Aachen University in November 2006 under the auspices of the Excellence Initiative of the German Federal Government and the governments of the federal states as part of the line for funding graduate schools. The program sets out to advance computational engineering in three critical areas of synthesis: model identification and discovery supported by model-based experimentation, understanding scale interaction and scale integration, and optimal design and operation of engineered systems. More

Helmholtz Group Performance Analysis of Parallel Programs

Located at the Jülich Supercomputing Centre and funded by the Helmholtz Association, this research group is affiliated with our lab and is our partner in the development of the Scalasca performance-analysis software. The objective of this group is very similar to ours and concentrates on the development of scalable performance technology for high-performance computing. More