Enhancing brainware productivity through a performance tuning workflow

Abstract

Operation costs of high performance computers, like cooling and energy, drive HPC centers towards improving the efficient usage of their resources. Performance tuning through experts here is an indispensable ingredient to ensure efficient HPC operation. This "brainware" component, in addition to software and hardware, is in fact crucial to ensure continued performance of codes in light of diversifying and changing hardware platforms. However, as tuning experts are a scarce and costly resource themselves, processes should be developed that ensure the quality of the performance tuning process. This is not to dampen human ingenuity, but to ensure that tuning effort time is limited to achieve a realistic substantial gain, and that code changes are accepted by users and made part of their code distribution. In this paper, we therefore formalize a service-based Performance Tuning Workflow to standardize the tuning process and to improve usage of tuning-expert time. © 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.