Jeffrey Vetter (ORNL/GATech) presenting at the Performance Modeling workshop.

Our workshop at ISC High Performance 2015 in Frankfurt on July 16, 2015, was well attended, and was considered by all speakers a great success. Performance modeling experts from different groups across the world presented their view of this important field, and interesting (and sometimes heated) discussions emerged. We saw a broad spectrum of methods, from analytical modeling to frameworks and from scaling analysis to machine learning approaches. Power and energy consumption also received due attention. In his keynote, Bill Gropp (UIUC) emphasized the importance of knowing the inherent hardware bottlenecks of numerical software in order to be able to put performance figures into perspective – a scalable application can nevertheless be extremely inefficient (in fact, there is a high probability that it is).

All slides can be found on the workshop page.