Work Packages

PeCoH consists of six work packages:

• WP1 Management
• WP2 Performance Engineering
• WP3 Performance Awareness
• WP4 HPC Certification Program
• WP5 Tuning SW Configurations
• WP6 Dissemination 

In addition to the management (WP1) and dissemination (WP6) work packages, there are four work packages (WP2 - WP5) for research.

Performance Engineering (WP2)

This work package provides the new and adapted concepts of performance engineering for the target domain and, thus implements the co-development service and the method benefit
of novel concepts. We will

• identify suitable performance engineering frameworks,
• relate typical analysis patterns to performance deficiencies,
• evaluate state-of-the-art approaches of partitioning patterns/procedures,
• provide means to monitor and visualize performance to identify relevant issues,
• identify best practices,
• evolve coding guidelines according to typical performance issues and
• forecast future performance by applying performance models and prototypes.

Based on the results of models and prototypes we

• extract knowledge about the effectiveness of concepts for different domains
• will periodically capture the fraction of
  • work time spent in different tasks
  • estimated or measured performance

This will be used to quantify the cost-benefit better and to identify cost-effective strategies.

Performance Awareness (WP3)

This work package implements our method for cost-awareness and combines it with the service for providing feedback. We will

• develop models to approximate costs for scientists,
• embed these models into the resource manager SLURM,
• track and report the resource utilization and efficiency of applications and data centers,
• work on tools to detect common performance issues (e.g., by misconfigurations),
• provide feedback to the users.

HPC Certification Program (WP4)

This work package covers the method competence management and the education service.

Our approach covers

• an analysis and classification of competences and their value for scientists,
• the development of a program to check and improve on these competences,
• the collection of material to improve base knowledge on these topics,
• an online tutorial packaging lists of relevant material and online content,
• online examinations to obtain the entry level of the certificates.

Examples for relevant competences are command line use, scripting, batch systems, parallel execution, scaling, understanding resource usage, compilers and performance engineering.

This will not only help users but also the support staff to better understand the experience and needs of the users.

Tuning Software Configurations (WP5)

This work package provides a help desk and determines high-level tuning possibilities of frequently used software. For example: Amber, Gromacs, Abaqus, OpenFOAM, Matlab, R.

Resulting in the documentation of best practices to avoid common (performance) mistakes.