About POP
HPC facilities are a major capital investment and often run close to capacity. Improving the efficiency of application software running on these facilities either speeds up time to solution or allows for larger, more challenging problems to be solved. The Performance Optimisation and Productivity (POP) Centre of Excellence exists to help academic and industry groups identify how their software can be improved, free of charge. Funded by the EU under the Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme, POP puts the world-class HPC expertise of eight commercial and academic partners at the disposal of European Scientists and Industry.
Collaborations with the POP CoE
Given that POP is home to a large set of performance experts, E-CAM has collaborated with them on (to date) two applications that are of particular interest to E-CAM with respect to extreme scalability: ESPResSo++ and PaPIM. We have also benefitted from their HPC specialists in one of our Extended Software Development Workshops organized by the Electronic Structure Library initiative[1] (ESL), where POP’s experts provided a 1.5 day Tutorial on advanced performance and scalability profiling of the ESL libraries.
Successful collaboration with POP: Optimization of PaPIM
POP carried out a study of PaPIM[2] which resulted in a 10 page report on its performance, highlighting issues in the code and proposing remedies. For example, the report showed that load imbalance issues in the expensive part of the application was mainly related to an uneven spread of the sample groups among the MPI tasks. Of more interest was the communication pattern, where the POP analysis showed that replacing a number of successive collective communications with a single collective of a derived data type could lead to a 4.7 x improvement in communication performance.
How it works
A simple request form should be completed at https://pop-coe.eu/request-service-form. One of their technical experts will be in touch to obtain the details.
Briefly, POP services involve the following steps.
- The first step is to profile the application behaviour using suitable parallel profiling tools, e.g. Extrae or Scalasca. This step creates trace files which require analysis by POP experts. This is typically done on the user’s machines. However, if this is not an option for a user, POP can collect performance data on one of their HPC machines. This task can be done either by POP experts or by users with POP support.
- The results from the analysis of the trace files are presented to the user, explaining the performance issues with the code and recommendations for performance improvements. Experience shows that it is often difficult to build a quantitative picture of parallel application behaviour. One of the strengths of POP is their set of metrics, which provide a standard, objective way to characterise different aspects of the performance of parallel codes.
- POP performance assessment can be followed up by further work, again completely free to the user, to demonstrate how to implement these improvements.
A feature that is particularly useful when dealing with industrial partnerships, is that POP services don’t require access to the source code – they can work with executables. And if needed, non-disclosure agreements can be signed.
[2] PaPIM is a code for computing time-dependent correlation functions and sampling of the phase space. It samples the phase space either classically or quantum mechanically. Documentation available here.
