Performance Tuning of Scientific Applications

With contributions from some of the most notable experts in the field, Performance Tuning of Scientific Applications presents current research in performance analysis. The book focuses on the following areas.

Performance monitoring: Describes the state of the art in hardware and software tools that are commonly used for monitoring and measuring performance and managing large quantities of data

Performance analysis: Discusses modern approaches to computer performance benchmarking and presents results that offer valuable insight into these studies

Performance modeling: Explains how researchers deduce accurate performance models from raw performance data or from other high-level characteristics of a scientific computation

Automatic performance tuning: Explores ongoing research into automatic and semi-automatic techniques for optimizing computer programs to achieve superior performance on any computer platform

Application tuning: Provides examples that show how the appropriate analysis of performance and some deft changes have resulted in extremely high performance

Performance analysis has grown into a full-fledged, sophisticated field of empirical science. Describing useful research in modern performance science and engineering, this book helps real-world users of parallel computer systems to better understand both the performance vagaries arising in scientific applications and the practical means for improving performance.

Read about the book on HPCwire and insideHPC

David Bailey is a chief technologist in the High Performance Computational Research Department at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Dr. Bailey has published several books and numerous research studies on computational and experimental mathematics. He has been a recipient of the ACM Gordon Bell Prize, the IEEE Sidney Fernbach Award, and the MAA Chauvenet Prize and Merten Hasse Prize.

Robert Lucas is the director of computational sciences in the Information Sciences Institute and a research associate professor in computer science in the Viterbi School of Engineering at the University of Southern California. Dr. Lucas has many years of experience working with high-end defense, national intelligence, and energy applications and simulations. His linear solvers are the computational kernels of electrical and mechanical CAD tools.

Samuel Williams is a researcher in the Future Technologies Group at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Dr. Williams has authored or co-authored thirty technical papers, including several award-winning papers. His research interests include high-performance computing, auto-tuning, computer architecture, performance modeling, and VLSI.