Optimising an HPC developer’s environment - Task 047

Fit to programme

This task has been identified by the working groups as part of the agenda behind WP 1.3.

The task number is 047.

Summary

For performance-oriented development, it can be very useful in having access to different software (libraries, compilers, etc.), tools (performance, correctness, etc.) and hardware (new generation CPUs, GPUs, etc.), but all of this needs to be supported by a robust ‘developers’ environment. SHAREing can contribute to the DRI community by recommending a set of performance tools that can be configured on testbed systems so that we are able to be nimble in swapping between hardware with robust tool support. Take for example, if we want to do a rigorous trace analysis across two different GPUs on a testbed, we may need tools such as Extrae or Scalasca, compiled on the different hardware and crucially for different combinations of compiler, MPI, etc. Of particular interest in selecting hardware is power consumption, so building in specific details about tools support for power consumption is seen as crucial for this task.

Methodology

This could be approached in two ways: 1) run a workshop brining together developers and platforms specialists to build this recommendation; 2) a small team working on this as an exploratory analysis. This flexibility is left to the submitter, however, the submission should have joint experience from an individual/group sitting more on the software development side, and an individual/group sitting on the infrastructure/platforms side.

Outcomes

A recommendation document to be hosted on the SHAREing webpages, and running a workshop to show how an accelerated, developer environment can support effective performance-oriented software development. A workshop like this may benefit from coordination from ACIT-Hub. Finally, work like this would be good to see put into practice on the testbeds that SHAREing is highlighting through its portal.