The Leading Source for Global News and Information Covering the Ecosystem of High Productivity Computing
March 21, 2008
The POINT of Performance
-- Petascale Productivity from Open, Integrated Tools (POINT)
March 21 -- The National Science Foundation (NSF) has recently funded a project that will integrate, harden, and deploy an open, portable, robust performance tools framework for productive performance engineering of petascale applications on the NSF TeraGrid systems. The multi-institutional POINT project, funded by the NSF Software Development for Cyberinfrastructure (SDCI) program, partners the University of Oregon, the University of Tennessee, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), and the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC).
According to Allen Malony of the University of Oregon, the project's principal investigator, "Now is the time to transfer successful, robust parallel performance infrastructure to an integrated, extensible, and sustainable performance tools suite that will be improved and supported for the long term to enable productive use of petascale HPC systems. In addition, if HPC resources are to be maximized, human-centric investments must also be made to help train application developers to be good performance engineers."
The POINT project will improve and support a parallel performance environment that integrates the widely-used TAU, PAPI, KOJAK, and PerfSuite technologies as core components. Each tool will be enhanced to better support user needs and evolving scalable HPC technology, and to interoperate as part of a performance engineering system to be used routinely in the performance evaluation and optimization of domain science and engineering (S&E) applications running on HPC systems of extreme scale.
This performance software foundation will be complemented by a community-driven education and training initiative to increase human productivity in performance engineering efforts across multiple S&E fields. The POINT training program for performance technology and engineering will be piloted and refined at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center and integrated with the TeraGrid Education, Outreach, Training (EOT) mission over time. The objectives are to educate application developers and students in sound performance evaluation methods, to teach them best practices for engineering high-performance code solutions based on expert tuning strategies, and to train them to use the performance tools effectively.
The POINT project will demonstrate the performance tool suite and performance engineering practice through application engagements with the NAMD, NEMO3D, and ENZO projects. Collaboration with ENZO developers will address their needs for getting large AMR problems to fit efficiently on newer multicore architectures. Performance engineering work on the NanoHub server at Purdue University will enable it to scale to handle large-scale problems (e.g., with NEMO3D) and large numbers of users. Integration of POINT tools with Charm++ will enable applications supported by that system (e.g., NAMD) to achieve better performance results.
The NSF awarded $2.19 million for the POINT project, which just completed its first quarter of the three-year grant. During this time, the team has outlined strategies for integration and interoperability between component tool sets, and begun planning pilot sessions for POINT training. The individual tools from the POINT project are currently available on TeraGrid systems, including deployment of TAU and PAPI on the Ranger machine at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC).
For more information, see the POINT project Web site at http://www.nic.uoregon.edu/point.
-----
Source: National Science Foundation
Article Tools
Share Options
(Digg, Technorati, more)
Subscribe
Sponsored Links
RSS Feeds
Feeds by Topic
- Applications
- Developer Tools
- Interconnects
- Middleware
- Networks
- Processors
- Storage
- Systems
- Visualization
Feeds by Industry
Feeds by Content Type
Feature Articles
Book Review: Petascale Computing: Algorithms and Applications
Petascale Computing: Algorithms and Applications, edited by David A. Bader, is the first book in CRC's Computational Science Series, edited by Horst Simon. Although the book is a collection of papers, Bader has done an excellent job of creating a compilation that holds together and covers a broad topic very well.
Read More...
The Week in Review
Cilk++ used in parallelization of the FP-tree algorithm for pattern mining; Istanbul benchmark results posted; and the latest on the NVIDIA Tesla shortage. John West recaps those stories and more in our weekly wrap-up.
Read More...
A Trio of HPC Offerings Unveiled at ISC
Last week's International Supercomputing Conference (ISC'09) was a convenient excuse for vendors to announce a raft of new products, but three, in particular, stood out.
Read More...
Top Headlines
Cloudy With a Chance of HPC
Jul 01 | GenomeWeb Daily News | The popularity of cloud computing in the life sciences community was on full display at April's Bio-IT World conference. Read more...
HPC From the Beach
Jul 01 | Linux Magazine | How can getting to the ocean help with HPC computing? Read more...
DARPA Investigates Extreme Supercomputing
Jun 29 | GCN.com | Agency issues RFI for "Ubiquitous High Performance Computing" systems. Read more...
Supercomputers Go From Biggest to Cheapest
Jun 29 | Computerworld | The bottom of the TOP500 reveals the coming revolution in truly accessible high-end computing. Read more...
CPUs Gear Up For -- and Some Avoid -- Hot Chips
Jun 18 | EE Times | Parallel software also takes spotlight at Stanford confab. Read more...
Featured Whitepapers
Building High Performance Computing in a Green and Modular Solution Building Block
Apr 14 | | Many HPC IT departments are feeling the rising pressure to deliver more capacity computing and performance while trying to reduce the total cost of ownership. This white paper discusses how an environmentally-friendly and open-standards HPC building block based computing system using flexible interconnect options helps address capacity computing needs.
Multimedia
Webcast: Dell Expands HPC Access and Adoption with Intel Cluster Ready Program
Source: Addison Snell, GM/VP, Tabor Research; sponsored by Dell
Many organizations that could benefit from the use of HPC clusters find that it is complicated to get the systems up and running because of limited IT resources or the complexities of the clusters themselves. Learn how the Intel Cluster Ready program, for which Dell was an original partner, seeks to address this challenge for entry level and mid-range HPC users.
Video White Paper: Architecting a Better Network Storage Solution
BlueArc's Titan architecture represents an evolutionary step in file servers by creating a hardware-based file system that can scale bandwidth, IOPS, and overall data capacity well beyond conventional software-based devices. With its ability to virtualize a massive storage pool of up to four usable petabytes of tiered storage, Titan can scale with growing data requirements, offering a competitive advantage for businesses, researchers, or other enterprises seeking to better manage data growth while still ensuring optimal performance.
Webcast: HPC Development Solutions: Sun Studio & Sun HPC ClusterTools
Sun Studio Compilers and Tools and Sun HPC ClusterTools allow you to create high performance parallel applications for OpenSolaris, Solaris and Linux. Sun Studio Express 11/08 includes MPI performance analysis capabilities and full OpenMP 3.0 compiler support. Learn about all this and the latest in Sun HPC ClusterTools 8.1.
Newsletters
Stay informed! Subscribe to HPCwire email Newsletters.
HPC Job Bank
-
HPC Systems Administrator
McGill University -
High Performance Computing Data Center Manager
National Renewable Energy Laboratory -
High Performance Computing Systems Administrator
Idaho National Laboratory -
Solution Engineer- HPC
Dell Inc - Visit the HPCwire Job Bank
Featured Events
-
July 08, 2009
Data Mining: Failure to Launch
WWW
-
July 13-16, 2009
WORLDCOMP'09
Las Vegas , NV
USA
-
August 24-28, 2009
Data Mining: Levels I, II, & III
Denver , CO
USA