WARWICK, U.K., March 18 — A new tool from Allinea Software is allowing users and supercomputer owners to see clearly what is happening within their HPC system – and ensure optimum performance from their applications.

System owners, developers and users are all interested to see what is going on ‘inside’ after they set a job to run. CPU hours are expensive and often in short supply – it’s vital to make the best use of them by ensuring the jobs run efficiently.

Allinea Performance Reports analyzes key metrics such as the effective vectorization, I/O and MPI performance for any application, allowing users and system managers to make sure code runs as effectively and efficiently as possible.

Cardiff University has been using Allinea Performance Reports to gain more insight into their systems at both its ARCCA service – which provides access and training in advanced computing to students and researchers – and at HPC Wales, its world-class supercomputing service for researchers and innovators in the public and private sectors.

The University needed a simple tool to analyze what each application was doing and how it could improve. The teams are managing a wide variety of application deployments across a diverse spectrum of research domains on both the ARCCA and HPC Wales systems. They required a tool that could handle the diverse range of codes required by these communities. Allinea Performance Reports has allowed them to unlock performance across the full spread of its infrastructure.

“Allinea Performance Reports has given us an insight into where workloads can be adjusted, which can be placed on more effectively on the hardware, or even recompiled to be able to perform more simulations to satisfy the demand for time on our systems,” says Martyn Guest, Director of ARCCA and Technical Director of HPC Wales.

More efficient machine use on the same compute resource means more research outputs, optimal performance in terms of energy consumption, more industrial success, resulting in greater returns on investment for users like the University.

“Our customers told us they need to see what is really happening in the HPC applications running on their systems and their real impact on the results,” says David Lecomber, CEO of Allinea Software. “They wanted a tool that would be so easy and non-intrusive to apply that it could analyze applications without configuration or change and help them to recognize where to focus their efforts to make the biggest differences – from using ISV software to running locally developed applications. Allinea Performance Reports allows users to improve the quality of every CPU hour used, “ continues Lecomber, “and each application to make the most use of the right system, the right configuration and the right usage.

Allinea Performance Reports was first showcased in November at SC13, in Colorado, USA, and won immediate fans. After an early access program that saw it deployed on a large number of HPC installations across the world; the product is now available from Allinea.

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Source: Allinea Software