Organizers

• Barton Miller (University of Wisconsin - Madison) "bart" AT "cs.wisc.edu"
• John Mellor-Crummey (Rice University) "johnmc" AT "cs.rice.edu"

Abstract

Petascale computer systems are now available to the DOE science community; a contract to install a 20 petaflop machine at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in 2011 has been announced. Compared to systems of the past, these machines represent a dramatic increase in scale and complexity. Making effective use of systems at this scale will require performance tools that help application developers by pinpointing and explaining application performance bottlenecks. Two performance challenges for applications are to make effective use of processor nodes, and to keep parallelization overhead low enough so that extreme-scale parallelism is practical.

Providing tools that make it possible to address these problems is requiring increasingly sophisticated methods for instrumentation, measurement, analysis and modeling of application performance. Meeting these challenges will require tools with unprecedented capabilities.

Today, research and development in the area of performance tools for parallel systems is fragmented. Individual groups have developed tools and components with unique capabilities. Working together to capitalize these capabilities into shared community infrastructure would reduce duplication of effort, accelerate development of effective tools with increasing sophistication, and simplify the process of developing tools for new systems as they emerge.

The goal of this workshop is to bring together tools researchers to discuss challenges of performance analysis and debugging on emerging petascale systems, review ongoing research, and work together to tackle the challenges of performance analysis on petascale systems together as a community. Attendees at the workshop will be tools developers in the areas of tools infrastructure, debugging, performance instrumentation, measurement, analysis, and visualization. We expect that about a third of the workshop will consist of opportunities to work together in smaller groups to make progress on tackling problems of mutual interest.

Specific aims of the workshop include

• Identifying performance tool capabilities needed to analyze the spectrum of issues that arise with petascale platforms.
• Discussing emerging capabilities of research and commercial tools in this space.
• Identifying common needs, functionality, and opportunities for sharing infrastructure.
• Discussing design aspects of sharable components.
• Developing standardized interfaces to facilitate sharing.

Agenda