Modern processors, such as Intel's Xeon Scalable line, AMD's EPYC architecture, ARM's ThunderX2 design, and IBM’s Power9 architecture are scaling out rather than up and increasing in complexity. Because the base frequencies for the large core count chips hover somewhere between 2-3 GHz, researchers can no longer rely on frequency scaling to increase the performance of their applications. Instead, developers must learn to take advantage of the increasing core count per processor and learn how to eke out more performance per core.
To achieve good performance on modern processors, developers must write code amenable to vectorization, be aware of memory access patterns to optimize cache usage, and understand how to balance multi-process programming (MPI) with multi-threaded programming (OpenMP). This tutorial will cover serial and thread-parallel optimization including introductory and intermediate concepts of vectorization and multi-threaded programming principles. We will address CPU as well as GPU profiling techniques and tools and give a brief overview of modern HPC architectures.
The tutorial will include hands-on exercises in parallel optimization, and profiling tools will be demonstrated on TACC systems. This tutorial is designed for intermediate programmers, familiar with OpenMP and MPI, who wish to learn how to program for performance on modern architectures.
