Organizers

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

Abstract

Soon petascale computer systems will be available to the DOE science community. Compared to existing systems, these emerging 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 was to bring together performance tools researchers to foster collaboration on a community infrastructure for performance tools. Specific aims of the workshop included

• Identifying performance tool capabilities needed to analyze the spectrum of issues that arise with emerging 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.

Working Agenda

Monday, July 21, 2008

Tuesday Morning, July 22, 2008

Break-out Groups (Tuesday Afternoon, Wednesday and Thursday)

We propose to break the attendees into working groups. The actual topics will be decided by the attendees. Here are some initial suggestions for possible topics:

• Binary analysis [Static Binary Rewriting Discussion Notes]
• MPI Low Level Access [Working Group Discussion Notes]
• Performance XML data format (PERIXML) [Working Group Discussion Notes]
• Scalable I/O for Performance Data [Slides][Discussion Notes]
• Monitoring harness
• Analysis from data to insight [Working Group Discussion Notes]
• Trace generation and processing
• Scalable control and data processing
• Managing and accessing large-scale performance data

Tuesday Afternoon, July 22, 2008

Wednesday, July 23, 2008

Thursday, July 24, 2008

Sponsors