Activities

To accomplish the project goals, multi-institution teams will conduct the following research activities:

  1. Performance portability: We will further extend PERI’s performance measurement, modeling and autotuning technology to petascale and heterogeneous systems, thus permitting scientists to exploit a wide range of high-end systems from a common code base. Team leader: Mary Hall, Utah.
  2. Energy efficiency: Relatively minor code changes can enable significant energy savings in some applications with little or no impact on performance. We will investigate application-level energy efficiency techniques to help reduce DOE’s energy costs. Team leader: Laura Carrington, UC San Diego.
  3. Resilience: Petascale calculations are pressing the limits of reliability in both hardware and system software. We will explore strategies to enable petascale applications to be resilient in the face of faults. Team leader: Bronis R. de Supinski, LLNL.
  4. Optimization: We will build on tools from the mathematical optimization community to develop strategies that collectively optimize performance, energy efficiency and resilience. This work will involve optimization models for different components and the use of multi-objective optimization techniques. Team leader: Paul Hovland, ANL.

SUPER researchers will actively seek to engage in collaborations with other SciDAC-3 institutes as well as the broader DOE computational sciences community. This will both focus our research on the real challenges facing petascale scientific computing as well as ensure the broad and immediate impact of the results of our research. We will work with DOE centers and HPC vendors to integrate, deploy, test, and document tools that achieve our objectives, and then actively collaborate with DOE center staff and scientific application teams to address high-priority codes and codes with special needs. Therefore, multi-institutional teams will also conduct the following activities.

  1. Application engagement: We will provide measurement and analysis tools, training, and a portal to help application developers model and optimize their codes and decide whether closer collaboration with SUPER would be useful. We will work with the computing centers to enhance user-level measurement and analysis capabilities and to identify applications for which further performance, energy or resilience enhancement is needed. We will work with other SciDAC-3 institutes to analyze and optimize their software and use of their software in application codes. Team leader: Patrick H. Worley, ORNL.
  2. Tool integration: We will create an integrated tool suite to enable end-to-end application optimization, including automated experiments for performance analysis and autotuning, power-aware instrumentation for energy evaluation, fault detection and vulnerability analysis, and scalable data management and presentation. Team leader: Allen D. Malony, Oregon.
  3. Outreach and tutorials: The state-of-the-art tools that we develop, especially the advanced autotuning and performance analysis tools, will require focused outreach in the form of both web-based and hands-on training. Team leader: David H. Bailey, LBNL.