Performance Optimisation and Productivity 2

The growing complexity of parallel computers is leading to a situation where code owners and users are not aware of the detailed issues affecting the performance of their applications. The result is often an inefficient use of the infrastructures. Even in the cases where the need to get further performance and efficiency is perceived, the code developers may not have insight enough on its detailed causes so as to properly address the problem. This may lead to blind attempts to restructure codes in a way that might not be the most productive ones. POP2 extends and expands the activities successfully carried out by the POP Centre of Excellence since October 2015. The effort in the POP project resulted in more than 120 assessment services provided to customers in academia, research and industry helping them to better understand the behaviour and improve the performance of their applications. The external view, advice, and help provided by POP have been extremely useful for many of these customers to significantly improve the performance of their codes by factors of 20% in some cases but up to 2x or even 10x in others. The POP experience was also extremely valuable to identify issues in methodologies and tools that if improved will reduce the assessment cycle time. The objective of POP2 is to continue and improve the POP project operating a Centre of Excellence in Computing Applications in the area of Performance Optimisation and Productivity with a special focus on very large scale towards exascale.POP2 will continue the service oriented activity, giving code developers, users and infrastructure operators an impartial external view that will help them improve their codes. We will still target the same categories of users and focus on identifying performance issues and proposing techniques that can help applications in the direction of exascale. Our objective is to perform 180 services over a three year period.