Performance Optimisation and Productivity for EU HPC Centres of Excellence (and European Parallel Application Developers Preparing for Exascale): Best Practice for Efficient and Scalable Application Performance

While parallel applications in all scientific and engineering domains have always been prone to execution inefficiencies that limit their performance and scalability, exascale computer systems comprising millions of heterogeneous processors/cores present a very considerable imminent challenge to be addressed for academia and industry alike. More than a dozen HPC Centres of Excellence are currently funded by the EU Horizon2020 programme to prepare applications for forthcoming exascale computer systems. The transversal Performance Optimisation and Productivity Centre of Excellence (POP CoE) [https://www.pop-coe.eu] supports the others, along with the wider European community of application developers, with impartial application performance assessments of parallel execution efficiency and scaling based on a solid methodology analysing measurements with open-source performance tools. This two-part minisymposium introduces the POP services and methodology, summarising results provided to date for over 200 customers with particular focus on those from the HPC CoEs. Engagements with the HPC CoEs will be reviewed in the introductory presentation, HPC CoEs will present their experience preparing their flagship codes for exascale, and a round-table discussion session with all presenters will conclude the minisymposium