PerfMiner Update
Sadly, Minimal Metrics has been unable to secure development funding for PerfMiner. We apologize to the many interested parties and thank you for your time an support. Should you be interested in seeing the pitch deck, please contact us at i n v e s t at minimal metrics.
A Performance Tool for Tomorrow’s Supercomputers and Applications
Minimal Metrics has partnered with Sandia National Laboratory to build a performance tool for tomorrow’s Exascale-class supercomputers – and to help inform their design. The system has its roots in a prototype first developed by Philip and colleagues at the Parallel Dator Centrum at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm Sweden. It is a set of software designed to optimize the entire HPC software and hardware ecosystem of an institution. It is capable of analyzing individual HPC applications and their threads of execution as well as entire workloads, groups, users and multiple disjoint systems. It accomplishes this by integrating the best-of-breed dashboarding and visualization methodologies with state-of-the-art performance data collection. detailed performance metrics from the underlying architecture, including memory bandwidth, memory hierarchy behavior and latencies, vectorization, hardware resource utilization, computational intensity and instruction mix are provided. The system is able to identify issues of on and off-node scaling, including message passing performance, load-imbalance, false-sharing, and…
MM tunes the SPEC benchmarks for a brand new architecture with Reservoir Labs
Here at Minimal Metrics our customers are often our friends – and we have lots of them around the world. Among our favorite people to work with are the brilliant people over at Reservoir Labs, makers of R-Scope among other neat bits of technology. Reservoir also has extensive compiler development expertise. When tasked with optimizing the SPEC CPU benchmarks for a brand new 64-bit multicore (non-Intel) processor, they reached out to the Minimal Metrics crew for guidance. The SPEC benchmarks are tricky animals, solely because one cannot modify the source code to improve its performance; all improvements have to be done by the compiler! On top of that, the source code is ugly, grossly inefficient and poorly documented. In many ways, the SPEC really are the most representative benchmarks in the industry because of those three facts alone. Nevertheless, in order to improve generated code, one still has to understand why the processor is performing the…
Sandia National Laboratory Renews With Minimal Metrics
In the previous engagement, Minimal Metrics studied and successfully accounted for the performance differences between compilers of multi-dimensional stencil computations on Intel’s Jake Town and Ivy Town architectures. In that particular case, the Cray and Intel compilers were used and the work was primarily performed on Volta, the Cray CX30m. This machine is just one of the Advanced System Technology Test Beds present in the National Nuclear Security Agencies (NNSA) Advanced Simulation and Computing Project. These machines represent small sections of the design space on the path to an exascale computer, meaning a machine capable of a billion, billion (or 10 to the 18th power) floating point operations per second. For this new engagement, Minimal Metrics will be working closely with the test bed team to do performance studies of codes being developed to run on these (and tomorrow’s exascale) machines. The data gathered is intended not only to help guide…
Minimal Metrics partners with Reservoir Labs
Minimal Metrics has partnered with Reservoir Labs to work on the prototyping of a entirely new computer architecture and the development of algorithms to run on it. About Reservoir Labs: Reservoir solves the critical technology challenges of high performance computing. Our advanced computing and communications products, thought-leading research and novel technologies have made Reservoir a trusted and respected partner of corporate clients, government agencies, and leading researchers. We thrive on opportunities to learn and create as we develop and deliver groundbreaking science and security solutions. This particular project is indeed groundbreaking science, and as such, we can’t say more other that we’re thrilled to be part of this effort, and to be working with our friends at Reservoir Labs once again.