HPC Workshop "Elements of Performance Engineering", by Dr. Georg Hager

by Dr Georg Hager

Tuesday 17 Mar 2026, 09:00 → 17:00 Europe/Berlin

Description

This course covers performance engineering approaches on the compute node level. It is a shortened version of an originally 3-day-course.

Even application developers who are fluent in OpenMP and MPI often lack a good grasp of how much performance could at best be achieved by their code. This is because parallelism takes us only half the way to good performance. Even worse, slow serial code tends to scale very well, hiding the fact that resources are wasted. This course conveys the required knowledge to develop a thorough understanding of the interactions between software and hardware. This process must start at the core, socket, and node level, where the code gets executed that does the actual computational work. We introduce the basic architectural features and bottlenecks of modern processors and compute nodes. Pipelining, SIMD, superscalarity, caches, memory interfaces, ccNUMA, etc., are covered. A cornerstone of node-level performance analysis is the Roofline model, which is introduced in due detail and applied to various examples from computational science. We also show how simple software tools can be used to acquire knowledge about the system, run code in a reproducible way, and validate hypotheses about resource consumption. Finally, once the architectural requirements of a code are understood and correlated with performance measurements, the potential benefit of code changes can often be predicted, replacing hope-for-the-best optimizations by a scientific process.

Note also our hackathon from Dr. Hager on the following day (March 18):

"Bring-Your-Own-Code Hackathon", with special focus on performance measurement and optimization using LIKWID https://indico.hiskp.uni-bonn.de/event/1306/

 

When and where is the workshop held?

The workshop is held in-person (no online participation possible) at the Hochschulrechenzentrum, Wegelerstr. 6. 

It takes place from 9:00 to 17:00, on Thursday, March 17, 2026

You need to register to participate.

Detailed schedule:

• 9:00-10:30 Part 1
• 10:30-11:00 Break
• 11:00-12:30 Part 2
• 12:30-13:30 Lunch break
• 13:30-15:00 Part 3
• 15:00-15:30 Break
• 15:30-17:00 Part 4

Who can register, and how?

The workshop is open to both Uni Bonn members (employees and students) and interested guests from other organizations. However, if there are too many registrations, Uni Bonn members have priority.

When you register, you will be put on a waiting list. You will be notified by March 10 whether you were accepted.

Prerequisites and equipment

Caution: This is not a beginner workshop! Basic knowledge of the following topics is recommended:

• C programming and compilation
• Basic use of an HPC cluster, particularly the Linux console, SSH and SLURM

 

You do not need to bring anything. You will be using the course room PCs and the supercomputer Marvin.

You do not need to have a Marvin account prior to the course, you will get temporary access.