Catwalk: A quick development path for performance models

Abstract

Many parallel applications suffer from latent performance limitations that may prevent them from scaling to larger machine sizes. Often, such scalability bugs manifest themselves only when an attempt to scale the code is actually being made—a point where remediation can be difficult. However, creating analytical performance models that would allow such issues to be pinpointed earlier is so laborious that application developers attempt it at most for a few selected kernels, running the risk of missing harmful bottlenecks. The objective of the Catwalk project, which is carried out as part of the DFG Priority Programme 1648 Software for Exascale Computing (SPPEXA), is to automate key activities of the performance modeling process, making this powerful methodology easier to use and expanding its coverage. This article gives an overview of the project objectives, describes the results achieved so far, and outlines future work.