The Centre of Excellence on Performance and Productivity Optimization (POP CoE) has the mission of assisting a wide community of HPC application developers and users across scientific and industrial domains. Its goal is to help them identify and understand performance issues in their applications, thereby improving efficiency and productivity. This is achieved through independent performance audits of codes, providing both qualitative and quantitative insights using POP’s tools and methodology.
While POP3 continues to target applications at all scales, special emphasis is placed on large-scale executions, with the objective of improving the scalability and efficiency of European flagship codes identified by other Centres of Excellence (CoEs) across diverse scientific areas. To achieve this, POP3 advances its performance tools to ensure broad usability across EuroHPC systems and to enable analysis at the scale required by these applications.
The main objectives of POP3 are twofold:
- Advancing tools and methodology:
POP3 develops performance analysis tools and techniques that address key aspects of scalability, modeling, and methodology. These are adapted to fully support EuroHPC platforms, ensuring they can handle large-scale analysis. The tools remain open source and are complemented by a comprehensive training program.
- Assessing applications at scale:
POP3 provides performance assessments for users and developers running, or aiming to run, large-scale applications. These assessments include recommendations on best practices for parallel programming and propose refactoring strategies to improve efficiency—covering both hardware utilization and energy consumption.
The expected impact of POP3 is threefold:
- Advancing the transition towards exascale:
By assessing a large number of codes, POP3 helps developers identify scalability bottlenecks and provides strategies to overcome them. The transition to exascale is both a technical and cultural challenge, requiring not only high-profile success stories at the largest scales but also continuous improvements across all scales. A solid understanding of execution behavior is essential to steer applications effectively toward higher scalability.
- Enabling effective applications:
Efficiency lies at the core of the POP3 methodology. By measuring execution and scaling efficiencies, POP3 offers clear guidance on maximizing resource utilization while minimizing time-to-solution and energy consumption. Although the project does not address the scientific quality of applications—that remains the role of domain-specific CoEs or industrial stakeholders—POP services ensure codes deliver results more effectively, improving the ratio of scientific or industrial output per unit of resources.
- Addressing scientific, industrial, and societal challenges:
POP3’s impact spans research, academia, industry, and public administration. Scientific research often pushes the boundaries of scalability, while industry typically operates at smaller scales. POP3 supports both communities at their respective levels, preparing them for the next scale. By disseminating a culture of efficiency and best practices, POP3 creates value not only for individual users but also for society, through more sustainable and cost-effective use of HPC resources.
