[On-Site] Node-Level Performance Engineering

10 Sept 2025, 09:00 → 12 Sept 2025, 17:00 Europe/Berlin

11302.02.135 (NHR@FAU)

Node-Level Performance Engineering

Schedule & Format

• Date: 2025, Sep 10-12
• Time:
  • Sep 10 10:00 - 17:00 CE(S)T
  • Sep 11 9:00 - 17:00 CE(S)T
  • Sep 12 9:00 - 15:00 CE(S)T
• Social Event:
  • TBA
• Location: On-Site at NHR@FAU
  • Martensstr. 3, 91058 Erlangen, Germany
  • Room 2.135 (11302.02.135)
• Language: English

 

This course covers performance engineering approaches on the compute node level.

Even application developers who are fluent in OpenMP and MPI often lack a good grasp of how much performance could at best be achieved by their code. This is because parallelism takes us only half the way to good performance. Even worse, slow serial code tends to scale very well, hiding the fact that resources are wasted. This course conveys the required knowledge to develop a thorough understanding of the interactions between software and hardware. This process must start at the core, socket, and node level, where the code gets executed that does the actual computational work. We introduce the basic architectural features and bottlenecks of modern processors and compute nodes. Pipelining, SIMD, superscalarity, caches, memory interfaces, ccNUMA, etc., are covered. A cornerstone of node-level performance analysis is the Roofline model, which is introduced in due detail and applied to various examples from computational science. We also show how simple software tools can be used to acquire knowledge about the system, run code in a reproducible way, and validate hypotheses about resource consumption. Finally, once the architectural requirements of a code are understood and correlated with performance measurements, the potential benefit of code changes can often be predicted, replacing hope-for-the-best optimizations by a scientific process.

Further information about the course (content, learning objectives, prerequisites, certification, etc.) can be found on the course page.

Prerequisites

Attendees should know one of the dominant programming languages in HPC (C, C++, Fortran) and the basics of parallel programming with OpenMP. They should also be able to work with a Linux command line.

Instructors

Dr. Georg Hager, NHR@FAU, Thomas Gruber, NHR@FAU, and Prof. Dr. Gerhard Wellein, NHR@FAU.

This course is organized by Erlangen National High Performance Computing Center (NHR@FAU).

Prices and Eligibility

This course is open and free of charge for participants affiliated with academic institutions in European Union (EU) member states and Horizon 2020-associated countries.

Registration

Please register at the bottom of this page. Registration is open until a few days before the course starts, or until the course is fully booked.

Withdrawal Policy

Please only register if you are committed to attending the course. No-shows will be blacklisted and excluded from future events.

If you need to withdraw your registration, please either cancel it directly through the registration system or send an email to sebastian.kuckuk@fau.de.

Wait List

If the course reaches its maximum capacity, you can request to join the wait list by sending an email to sebastian.kuckuk@fau.de. Please include your name and university affiliation in the message.

Additional Courses

You can find an up-to-date list of all courses offered by NHR@FAU at https://hpc.fau.de/teaching/tutorials-and-courses/.