In the podcast, Mike Bernhardt from ECP catches up with Sameer Shende to learn how the Performance Research Lab at the University of Oregon is helping to pave the way to Exascale.
Sameer Shende
Developers of parallel computing applications can well appreciate the Tuning and Analysis Utilities (TAU) performance evaluation tool—it helps them optimize their efforts. Sameer has worked with the TAU software for nearly two and a half decades and has released more than 200 versions of it.
Whatever your application looks like, there’s a good chance that TAU can support it and help you improve your performance,” says Sameer Shende from the University of Oregon.
Shende says TAU can show developers where an application spends its time and other system resources, adding, “You can see the code regions of interest, where you should study your application performance, and where you should focus your optimization efforts.”
TAU supports what are referred to as profiling and tracing. The tool’s profiling mode shows summary statistics; it’s tracing mode reveals what each process of the application is doing.
TAU is a very versatile performance evaluation toolkit, and you can use it on unmodified binaries; so, you don’t have to make any changes to your code—just run the code with TAU to generate the performance data,” he explained.
Shende describes TAU as consisting of two functional parts: code instrumentation and analysis. Code instrumentation, he said, is very intuitive, and analysis can be performed by launching a 3D profile browser called ParaProf.
TAU is a tremendous productivity improvement for developers, especially because it runs on most high-performance computing platforms. It is also part of ECP’s Extreme-Scale Scientific Software Stack (E4S) release 0.1, which was issued during SC18.
It is great opportunity to work with Dr. Sameer and his team on the TAU performance tool .. At the University of Oregon, Sameer teamed up with OpenPOWER Academia and Research team looking at the problem of performance engineering of complex PowerAI applications. TAU Performance System® is a performance profiling and tracing toolkit and it has been successfully applied to evaluate the performance of PowerAI components.
Do visit our 2018 reflections .. OpenPOWER Academia and Research 2018 reflections : https://youtu.be/7tA7bFxHRjg
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/openpower-academia-research-2018-reflections-ganesan-narayanasamy