Caliper Library Highlighted at 31st VI-HPS Tuning Workshop

The Virtual Institute – High Productivity Supercomputing (VI-HPS) conducts a long-running series of tuning workshops, where participants can learn about programming tools developed by the institute partners. Morning sessions consist of tool presentations and hands-on exercises. In the afternoon, users can apply the tools to their own codes with the help of the instructors. Whilst most of the workshops take place in Europe, the 31st tuning workshop was held at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville (UTK), on April 9–12, 2019.

As part of the workshop, LLNL computer scientist David Boehme conducted a 75-minute tutorial on Caliper, an open-source performance profiling library for HPC software. The session included hands-on exercises using the Lulesh proxy application as an example. There were around 15–20 participants, primarily HPC software developers from UTK and Oak Ridge National Laboratory, as well as the other HPC tool presenters. This tutorial marked the first time Caliper was presented within the VI-HPS tuning workshop series. Boehme’s tutorial was well received, and several participants were able to successfully apply Caliper to their programs.

The workshop also provided an opportunity to discuss common software infrastructure as well as integration and interoperability possibilities with other performance analysis tools. For example, the PAPI team plans to explore using Caliper’s data collection and processing functionality. Finally, as a VI-HPS member organization, LLNL’s participation in the tuning workshop series helped showcase the Lab’s strong portfolio of open-source programming tools among the VI-HPS partners and in the HPC community at large.

Learn more about Caliper:

• Caliper GitHub repo
• Caliper documentation
• Caliper: Application Introspection System