Framework and Modular Infrastructure for Automation of Architectural Adaptation and Performance Optimization for HPC Systems

High performance systems have complex, diverse and rapidly evolving architectures. The span of applications, workloads, and resource use patterns is rapidly diversifying. Adapting applications for efficient execution on this spectrum of execution environments is effort intensive. There are many performance optimization tools which implement some or several aspects of the full performance optimization task but almost none are comprehensive across architectures, environments, applications, and workloads. This paper presents, illustrates, and applies a modular infrastructure which enables composition of multiple open-source tools and analyses into a set of workflows implementing comprehensive end-to-end optimization of a diverse spectrum of HPC applications on multiple architectures and for multiple resource types and parallel environments. It gives results from an implementation on the Stampede HPC system at the Texas Advanced Computing Center where a user can submit an application for optimization using only a single command line and get back an at least, partially optimized program without manual program modification for two different chips. Currently, only a subset of the possible optimizations is completely automated but this subset is rapidly growing. Case studies of applications of the workflow are presented. The implementations currently available for download as the PerfExpert tool version 4.0 supports both Sandy Bridge and Intel Phi chips.