NHR PerfLab Seminar: Memories of a Performance Engineer: 38 Years of Tools Building (October 21, Hybrid)
Topic: Memories of a Performance Engineer: 38 Years of Tools Building
Speaker: Dr. Bernd Mohr, Jülich Supercomputing Center
Date and time: Tuesday, October 21, 2025, 2:00 p.m. CEST
Location: seminar room 02.049 (RRZE, Martensstraße 1, 91058 Erlangen)
Or online via Zoom: https://go-nhr.de/perflab-seminar
Abstract:
I created my first performance tool for parallel systems as part of my diploma thesis at the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Bavaria, in 1987. Since then, I never changed my research topic and was involved in the development of many (well-known?) HPC performance tools: TDL/POET, ZM4, SIMPLE, TAU, Vampir, EPILOG, KOJAK, Score-P, Scalasca, and Cube. The talk will highlight successes and failures of the different tools and will provide a personal assessment of the state of HPC performance tools.
Short bio:
Bernd Mohr started to design and develop tools for performance analysis of parallel programs already with his diploma thesis (1987) at the University of Erlangen in Germany and continued this in his Ph.D. work (1987 to 1992). During a three-year postdoc position at the University of Oregon, he designed and implemented the original TAU performance analysis framework. Since 1996 he has been a senior scientist at Forschungszentrum Jülich. From 2000 to 2024, he has been the team leader of the group “Programming Environments and Performance Analysis.” Besides being responsible for user support and training in regard to performance tools at the Jülich Supercomputing Centre (JSC), he is leading the Scalasca performance tools efforts in collaboration with Prof. Felix Wolf of TU Darmstadt. Since October 2022, he has also served as head of the JSC division “Application Support,” for which he was deputy head for 15 years.
For a list of past and upcoming NHR PerfLab seminar events, please see: https://hpc.fau.de/research/nhr-perflab-seminar-series/