Application Performance Tools

Mission Statement

The Application Performance Tools group conducts research and development and manages vendor interactions in the development and use of software tools and middleware needed to assess and improve application performance on current and emerging HPC systems. The group is primarily focused on issues that arise when using extreme-scale systems and is actively working in the areas of high-performance communication, user- and operating system- level run-time middleware, compiler-based code transformations, file-systems, and performance characterization.

To fully utilize the capabilities of high-end computer systems, we provide the necessary understanding of technical hurdles and the means for surpassing these barriers. We work to ensure an efficient development environment for all aspects of complex scientific application programs.

• Communications Middleware -- Open MPI, Networking research, InfiniBand, collective algorithms, vendor collaborations (Mellanox
• Compliers based transformations -- Open64, research in complier feedback/transformations
• Fault tolerance -- Basic R&D in proactive fault tolerance at middleware layers (MPI) and below (Colorado State Univ.)
• Benchmarking -- Confidence, important performance measurements with characterize system behavior at scale (latency, noise, etc.)
• Runtime & operating systems -- Basic R&D in highly scalable runtime systems, Scalable Tools Communications Infrastructure (STCI), Colony, GPU aware computing, university collaborations (Univ. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
• Input/Output Middleware -- Removing secondary storage barriers for extreme scale systems, I/O Forwarding Scalability Layer(IOFSL)
• Large-scale debugging -- Allinea Distributed Debugging Tools (DDT), vendor collaborations (Allinea)
• Large-scale tracing -- VampirTracevendor collaboration (Dresden University of Technology)
• Power/heat aware computing

Group Members:

• Matthew Baker (bakermb@ornl.gov)
• Jens Domke (domkej@ornl.gov)
• Manjunath Gorentla Venkata (manjugv@ornl.gov)
• Oscar Hernandez (oscar@ornl.gov)
• Stephen Hodson (hodsonsw@ornl.gov)
• Chung-Hsing Hsu (hsuc@ornl.gov)
• Josh Hursey (hurseyjj@ornl.gov)
• Terry R. Jones (trjones@ornl.gov)
• Christos Kartsaklis (kartsaklisc@ornl.gov)
• Gregory Koenig (koenig@ornl.gov)
• Jeffery Kuehn (kuehn@ornl.gov)
• Joshua Ladd (laddjs@ornl.gov)
• Josh Lothian (lothian@ornl.gov)
• Tiffany Mintz (mintztm@ornl.gov)
• Bradley Settlemyer (settlemyerbw@ornl.gov)
• Pavel Shamis (shamisp@ornl.gov)
• Jean-Charles Vasnier (vasnierjr@ornl.gov)

Papers/Publications:

• Overlapping Computation and Communication: Barrier Algorithms and ConnectX-2 CORE-Direct Capabilities