Performance Analysis, Evaluation and Optimisation

Tutors

Vladimir Getov (Westminster), Tony Hey (Southampton), Roger Hockney (Independent Consultant)

Summary

Achieving the highest possible applications performance has always been one of the main goals of parallel computing. Unfortunately, most often the real performance is less by a factor of 10 and even worse from the available peak figures. Thus the usual picture when porting a production code is a "slow" application on a "fast" supercomputer. All this makes parallel performance evaluation, analysis and optimisation an area of priority in high-performance parallel computing.

This tutorial will give a comprehensive introduction to performance evaluation methodology as well as an overview of performance analysis and optimisation techniques. Various issues related with parametrisation of performance measurements, characterisation of applications and architectures, and interpretation of results will be discussed. The methods of analytical performance modelling and estimation will be introduced in detail, and their application will be shown in case studies. These issues will be illustrated with latest benchmark results including PARKBENCH and NPB codes for the state-of-the-art parallel computers - Origin-2000, SP2, T3E, TERA, and others.

Tutor information

Vladimir Getov is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Computer Science at the University of Westminster and Head of the Computer Systems Performance Engineering Group there. Dr Getov has considerable experience in the performance analysis and evaluation of parallel and distributed systems with a proven research record of over 50 published papers. His current research interests include the development of portable performance optimisation strategies and multi-language high-performance programming environments. He has actively participated in the work of the PARKBENCH Committee since its creation in 1992 and is now involved in the activities of the Java Grande Forum.

Tony Hey is Professor of Computation and Head of the Department of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton. He is also Chairman of the Parallel Applications Centre (PAC), which works closely with industry in a technology transfer role. Professor Hey has been a leading researcher in parallel computing for many years, being the initiator for the creation of the Genesis parallel benchmarks; prior to this suite, no systematic collection of benchmarks to evaluate distributed memory architectures existed. Over recent years, he has led many successful EPSRC and European projects in parallel and distributed computation, including the development of international software standards as well as performance analysis and prediction for applications on parallel systems. He is on the editorial board of a number of scientific journals and has been on the organising committee of many international conferences. He is also the co-founder, with Jack Dongarra, and the current chairman of the PARKBENCH Committee initiated at Supercomputing'92 in Minneapolis.

Roger Hockney is Emeritus Professor of Computer Science at Reading University, and visiting Professor at Westminster and Southampton Universities. Professor Hockney has a track record of pioneering work in numerical analysis of parallel kernels and performance evaluation of vector supercomputers and has already made significant contributions to the analysis of the performance of parallel computer systems. He is now working as an independent consultant in parallel computing, concentrating on the benchmarking of parallel computers and the development of the PARKBENCH Interactive Curve-Fitting Tool on the Web. He was the first chairman of the PARKBENCH committee, and one of the co-founders of Euroben, and has been largely responsible for the low-level benchmarks and the performance evaluation methodology in both initiatives.