Periodic Reporting for period 2 - POP (Performance Optimisation and Productivity)
Periodo di rendicontazione: 2016-10-01 al 2018-03-31
The complexity, scale and variability in behavior for current HPC systems already exposes an important distinction between how developers and users think that applications and systems behave and how they actually behave.
POP offers a service to asses performance of a wide range of computing applications in a wide range of configurations from a few dozen processors to many thousands of processors. POP provides its Customers with detailed analysis of the issues affecting the performance of their code as well as suggests the most optimal way to alleviate these issues. POP targets application developers and users from all domains, including infrastructure operators, academic and industrial users. The estimated number of these applications in Europe is projected at 1500 codes. POP has the ambition of analyzing over 150 of these types of codes within the project lifetime.
However, POP does not stop at the service. POP is working to generate and expand the market. In our target customers (the communities of code developers, users and resource operators) POP aims to provide a recognized high value service that will save on developer effort and make the most of available resources while minimising cost. Based on the services from POP, application developers will make better-informed decisions to drive their work in the more productive direction. Infrastructure operators will ensure that their systems are provisioned in the most efficient way to maximise their Return on Investment. End-users (both academic and industrial) will stop wasting money and time by using applications operating below their optimal levels.
POP is one of the nine CoEs that was selected under the e-Infrastructure call (H2020-EINFRA-2014-2015/H2020-EINFRA-2015-1). POP started on 1 October 2015 and will run until 31 March 2018. The project has received EUR 4 million funding from the European Union‘s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. For more information, visit the project website: https://pop-coe.eu/
Until middle May when the project is preparing the final review the total number POP studies is 191. This includes 169 assesment studies with 139 completed or being reported. Additionally we have implemented 22 Proof of Concepts, with 19 already completed. Even the project has ended, we continue serving the users on a best effort basis. Close to 50% of the POP users had a second service either on the same code or for a different application.
95% of the customer are satisfied with the POP service. During the last months we start to be able to gather quantitative information from few customers on economic savings on Performance Plans and Proofs of concept that appear to be quite positive, although the cases are very diverse: the current feedback includes figures between 1.3 and 10 over one year with an average of 5.4.
We have performed detailed analysis about the sustainability options in POP. Studying three aspects: monitoring the costs of providing the service; estimating in qualitative and quantitative (€) terms the potential gains achievable/achieved by the insight delivered by the service; quantifying the price customers want to pay for it in their current context. This has been reported in deliverable D3.6 along with the plan for working towards long-term sustainability.
Since about 100 customers benefited from POP services (several of them having benefited from an Audit + a PP + a PoC), assuming that each of them could gain 30k€ - which is reasonable given the figures we got - the expected savings could amount to 3M€.