Node-Level Performance Engineering

Even in scientific computing, code development often lacks a basic understanding of performance bottlenecks and relevant optimization opportunities. Textbook code transformations are applied blindly without a clear goal in mind. This course teaches a structured model-based performance engineering approach on the compute node level. It aims at a deep understanding of how code performance comes about, which hardware bottlenecks apply and how to work around them. The pivotal ingredient of this process is a model which links software requirements with hardware capabilities. Such models are often simple enough to be done with pencil and paper (such as the well-known Roofline model), but they lead to deep insights and strikingly accurate runtime predictions. The lecture starts with simple benchmark kernels and advances to various algorithms from computational science.

BIO

Georg Hager holds a PhD in Computational Physics from the University of Greifswald. He is a senior researcher in the HPC Services group at Erlangen Regional Computing Center (RRZE) at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg. Recent research includes architecture-specific optimization strategies for current microprocessors, performance engineering of scientific codes on chip and system levels, and special topics in shared memory and hybrid programming. His daily work encompasses all aspects of user support in High Performance Computing like tutorials and training, code parallelization, profiling and optimization, and the assessment of novel computer architectures and tools. His textbook "Introduction to High Performance Computing for Scientists and Engineers" is recommended or required reading in many HPC-related lectures and courses worldwide. In his teaching activities he puts a strong focus on performance modeling techniques that lead to a better understanding of the interaction of program code with the hardware.

http://blogs.fau.de/hager/
 
Gerhard Wellein holds a PhD in Solid State Physics from the University of Bayreuth and is Professor for HPC at the Department for Computer Science at University of Erlangen-Nuremberg. He heads the HPC group at Erlangen Regional Computing Center (RRZE) and has more than ten years of experience in teaching HPC techniques to students and scientists from Computational Science and Engineering. His research interests include solving large sparse eigenvalue problems, novel prarallelization approaches, performance modeling and engineering, and architecture-specific optimization. Together with G. Hager and J. Treibig he is the recipient of the 2011 Informatics Europe Curriculum Best Practices Award in recognition of the outstanding educational initiative “Teaching High Performance Computing to Scientists and Engineers: A Model-Based Approach”.

http://www.hpc.informatik.uni-erlangen.de/wir-ueber-uns/personal.shtml/gerhard-wellein.shtml

REFERENCES

• Georg Hager, Gerhard Welleinn Introduction to High Performance Computing for Scientists and Engineers
  July 2, 2010 by CRC Press
  Reference - 360 Pages - 143 B/W Illustrations
  ISBN 9781439811924 - CAT# K10600
  Series: Chapman & Hall/CRC Computational Science