Sunday November 13, 2005

I attended the Developer Tools breakout session of Sun's HPC Consortium meeting this morning in Seattle. It's amazing to see the turnout here and in other sessions at 8am on rainy, foggy Sunday morning. In addition to a set of Sun presentations, we had several customer presentations, which I've summarized below.

Dieter an Mey, RWTH Aachen University, Germany

Dieter an Mey, who is well-known to many of us involved in HPC at Sun, gave a presentation titled HPC Program Development. Dieter works at RWTH Aachen University where he is heavily involved in the universitied HPC efforts. He's also very involved in the industry-wide OpenMP effort.

Dieter presented results of several parallel application development and tuning efforts. His slides were graphical and dense, so I will attempt only a short summary here.

The Center now supports four platforms: SPARC Solaris, Opteron Solaris, Opteron Linux, and Opteron Windows. Doing this requires more tools and more compilers. And more work for Aachen staff. But more opportunity to attract a wider variety of users.

Dieter presented some results of a porting effort moving an application from Windows/Intel to Windows Opteron. He was able to achieve a 6.2x improvement overall, which was quite good. However, he could not resist also trying a port to Solaris/Opteron, which he did using a variety of Sun's tools, including his favorite performance analysis tool, Sun Analyzer. All in, all done, he achieved a speedup of 14x on Solaris Opteron. Nice.

Allen Malony, University of Oregon, USA

Professor Allen Malony gave a talk entitled TAU at Work about the TAU Parallel Performance System which has been developed over the past 14+ years. I highly recommend visiting the TAU site via the previous link as I can't possibly due this system justice here.

TAU is essentially a performance analysis framework for high performance computing. It is portable and open source. It supports multiple languages (C, F77, F90, C++, Java, etc.), multiple programming paradigms (multi-threading, message passing, hybrid models, etc.)

It supports performance instrumentation, measurement, and analysis--including scalable visualization in support of performance analysis. Instrumentation can be done at the source level (either manually or automatically), at the object level (via pre-instrumented libraries), or at the executable level via dynamic instrumentation.

TAU has been available previously on Solaris/SPARC and now will soon be available on Solaris 10 for Opteron. Cool.

Oscar Hernandez, University of Houston, USA

Oscar Hernandez, a graduate student at the University of Houston, spoke about the OpenUH project, which is creating an open source, portable OpenMP compiler suite that supports research into OpenMP language features, teaching, and exploration of tools for use with OpenMP.

Open64-UH is based on the Open64 compiler that was released to open source by SGI. It supports C, C++, Fortran77 and Fortran90.