CATWALK - A Quick Development Path for Performance Models

以艾级运行应用程序的成本将是巨大的。因此，将代码的运行时和能耗降低到最低是至关重要的。此外，许多现有应用程序存在固有的可伸缩性限制，这将使它们无法以艾级运行。当前的调优实践依赖于诊断实验，这是不够的，因为(I)它们在开发过程中发现可伸缩性问题太晚，而此时已经在不充分的解决方案上投入了大量精力，以及(Ii)它们招致了潜在的大量全面实验的额外成本。相比之下，分析性能模型允许应用程序开发人员解决设计或原型阶段已经存在的性能问题。不幸的是，创建这样的模型的困难，加上缺乏适当的工具支持，仍然使性能建模成为一门深奥的学科，只有相对较少的专家社区才能掌握。因此，该项目的目标是提供一套灵活的工具来支持性能建模过程的关键活动，使更广泛的高性能计算应用程序开发人员能够使用这一强大的方法。该工具套件将用于研究和帮助提高生命科学、流体动力学和粒子物理应用程序的可扩展性。

The cost of running applications at exascale will be tremendous. Reducing runtime and energy consumption of a code to a minimum is therefore crucial. Moreover, many existing applications suffer from inherent scalability limitations that will prevent them from running at exascale in the first place. Current tuning practices, which rely on diagnostic experiments, are insufficient because (i) they detect scalability problems too late in the development process when major effort has already been invested into an inadequate solution and (ii) they incur the extra cost of potentially numerous full-scale experiments. Analytical performance models, in contrast, allow application developers to address performance issues already during the design or prototyping phase. Unfortunately, the difficulties of creating such models combined with the lack of appropriate tool support still render performance modeling an esoteric discipline mastered only by a relatively small community of experts. The objective of this project is therefore to provide a flexible set of tools to support key activities of the performance modeling process, making this powerful methodology accessible to a wider audience of HPC application developers. The tool suite will be used to study and help improve the scalability of applications from life sciences, fluid dynamics, and particle physics.