New software tool supports advanced application development and modelling
The advent of faster, more powerful computing chips is prompting developers to create more productive and efficient software, fuelled by huge investment in the sector. The EU-funded MADAME (Manycore application development and modeling environment) project investigated programme development, optimisation and deployment of parallel applications for current and future manycore and multicore architectures. To achieve its aims, the project team worked with an application programming interface that supports multi-platform shared memory multiprocessing programming known as OpenMP. It strove to develop an efficient, versatile, user-friendly and portable monitoring solution for programming paradigms of the multicore and manycore era. Another main project objective was to develop a modelling framework to support developers in answering critical questions such as the potential benefits of exploiting accelerators. The resulting models are useful during application development and tuning, as well as during deployment and runtime in modern manycore operating systems. As a result of its research, MADAME developed ompP, a viable profiling tool for OpenMP applications. The software successfully creates a profiling report in a human-readable ASCII format, supporting the measurement of hardware performance counters using PAPI. The tool also supports productivity features such as overhead analysis and detection of common inefficiency situations. It can be downloaded from the project website along with several publications on the topic.
Keywords
Application development, computer chips, manycore, multicore, programming, multiprocessing
