Score-E - Scalable Tools for Energy Analysis and Tuning in HPC

For some time, computing centres have been feeling the severe financial impact of the energy consumption of computing systems, especially in the area of high-performance computing (HPC). Today, the share of energy already accounts for a third of the total costs of ownership and is continuously growing. The main objective of the Score-E project, funded under the 3rd call by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) for "HPC software for scalable parallel computers", is to provide user-friendly analysis and optimization tools for the energy consumption of HPC applications. These tools (Scalasca, Vampir, Periscope, and TAU) will enable software developers to investigate the energy consumption of their parallel programs in detail and to identify the program parts with excessive energy demands, together with suggestions on how to make improvements and to evaluate them quantitatively.

In addition, the project will develop models to describe energy-related aspects that are not directly measurable and to provide a powerful visualization of the measurement results. At the same time, the project will further develop and maintain the community instrumentation and measurement system Score-P, which forms the common base of all four tools mentioned above. Training and support for the software will be offered by VI-HPS and will continue beyond the lifetime of the Score-E project itself.

The project is coordinated by the Gesellschaft für numerische Simulation mbH in Braunschweig and involves - besides the Jülich Supercomputing Centre - four partners from German universities and three associated project partners. The project website will soon be online at http://www.vi-hps.org/projects/score-e.
(Contact: Christian Rössel, c.feld@fz-juelich.de)

from JSC News No. 216, 23 October 2013