The EU-funded POP project is helping developers and users of computationally intensive programs to accelerate their execution and thus enable them address bigger problems in less time and at minimum cost. We do that by first providing deep insight on the actual behavior of current programs, identification of the fundamental causes of inefficiencies on today machines and suggestions and support on how to improve the programs to maximize the use of available resources. We target current parallel computers and their foreseen evolution.

What is the innovation

We rely on performance analysis tools (fairly mature) developed by the partners over the years (BSC tools, Scalasca). The project focuses on the methodological and best practice aspects of applying these tools and background to real production codes. both from academic and industrial customers. We have developed a unified set of metrics and analysis practices to maximize the insight provided to customers.

About the Innovator

POP is a small consortium (BSC, JSC, HLRS, RWTH,NAG and Teratec) of institutions with an excellent track in research on performance analysis and programming models. We provide “assessment” services on the performance of parallel applications and how to improve them. In “proof-of-concept ” follow up services  we help customers to apply the proposed techniques and demonstrate the actual performance gains. (an assessment costs about 1 ManxMonth, a PoC 4 MM)

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Twitter: @POP_HPC

Out of the lab – Into the Market

This is what the project is all about. We have already performed more than 100 assessments for real customers outside the consortium. They belong to countries all over Europe. 25% of them are industrial SMEs and the rest academic. We perform customer satisfaction follow ups and can confirm that they are very happy with the service.

Benefits of participation in the Framework Programme

Overall the programme helped us develop our technologies, extend and reinforce relationships with customers and in particular by providing some paths to access customers (e.g. other CoEs).

Besides helping our customers, in this project we gain insight to further develop out tools and programming models as well as future architectures.

Further information on the POP project can be found here: https://pop-coe.eu/