Abstract

In order to focus on key performance issues and obtain the biggest benefit for developer effort, profiling an application is critical to understanding that program’s performance and behavior. However, using a profiling tool can sometimes be a daunting task because it is used less frequently than other software, such as a compiler. In addition to a wealth of capability for whole program analysis across many nodes, the Cray performance tools provide a simple interface that allows users to easily obtain a rich set of information to help identify important performance bottlenecks.  This presentation discusses use of the Cray perftools-lite interfaces, their ease of use and the type of information that can be obtained.  Guidance for interpreting results, and some useful tips when analyzing performance of an application will also be presented.

About the speaker

Heidi Poxon is a Sr. Principal Engineer and technical lead in the Programming Environments group at Cray. She has over 25 years of experience in the High Performance Computing industry, where she has designed, developed, and ported distributed and shared memory parallel programming model software to a variety of systems. Heidi has led the direction, design, and implementation of message passing software at Cray, and was instrumental in the success of the distributed computing environment at SGI that allowed applications to scale on their leading-edge system. Using her experience with proprietary networks, she led the interconnect and distributed computing direction while working at an HPC Linux-based cluster company. Heidi currently leads the performance tools activities for all Cray systems, and is the principal designer of Cray's application parallelization tool, Reveal.