PerfSuite: An Automatic Performance Suite for HPC Applications

The powerful computing capabilities of supercomputers enable them to execute a wide variety of high performance computing (HPC) applications. However, when executing HPC applications, the low hardware utilization prevents the efficiency of supercomputers from being fully exploited. Performance analysis is an effective way to discover performance bottlenecks. Existing research focuses on the profiling or modeling of HPC application performance, lacking systematic automatic performance analysis and tuning methods. To address the above challenge, in this paper, we propose a composable suite for HPC applications that can achieve low-overhead performance profiling, fine-grained performance modeling and automatic performance tuning. Specifically, a low-overhead profiling method is first proposed to accurately characterize the performance of HPC applications while minimizing the interference of measurement. Then, fine-grained performance models are built to predict the performance of HPC applications based on the profiling sampling. Finally, according to the performance models, an automatic tuning method is designed to improve the performance of coupled HPC applications. The experimental results show that the overhead of our profiling method is less than 15% for the benchmarks and the real-world applications. The average relative error of our modeling method is less than 10%. The optimal layouts contribute to the total running time savings of 16.33% and the total computing fee savings of 31.44%. The effectiveness of our methods is superior to the baselines.