| Status | Available / Under development |
| Access arrangements | Contact Dr Tuomas Koskela |
| Organisations | University College London, University of Reading, University of Bristol |
| Project linkage | All ExCALIBUR projects |
This project continues the ExCALIBUR Benchmarking Initiative begun as part of the Adaptable Cluster H&ES project, bringing together and enabling ExCALIBUR projects to benchmark their applications on the diverse supercomputing platforms available in the UK’s HPC ecosystem.
The team will collaborate with other ExCALIBUR teams through regular community meetings, knowledge exchange, presentations from projects and topical discussions, training sessions, and 1:1 drop-in sessions to assist application developers with contributing benchmarks to the framework. We will deploy the framework on UK Tier1/2 systems and the feasibility of deployment on H&ES testbeds will be investigated. Development of new features will be driven by feedback from users via GitHub. We will significantly expand the performance analysis in ReFrame to visualize complex performance portability (PP) data, making it convenient for ExCALIBUR application teams to measure and improve the PP of their codes.
Application benchmarking is a crucial activity in the UK’s path to Exascale. It ensures future Exascale systems are understood by the community so that UK Science Applications, particularly those developed as part of ExCALIBUR, can take advantage of the scientific opportunities at Exascale. Linear solvers are a ubiquitous pattern in many ExCALIBUR codes, and this project will develop a suitable benchmark applicable to many of UK codes. Application benchmarks are part of the enabling software stack that allows the performance of hardware to be assessed for scientific workloads.
It is vital to rigorously measure the performance of benchmarks in a systematic way to enhance the transparency and enable reproducibility. International conferences in this space are now mandating reproducibility information. This project provides the tooling to make collecting and analysing performance data straightforward. This will allow application owners to develop the skills and experience to measure the performance of their code across the gamut of the UK’s supercomputer facilities, and improve their code based on benchmarking as they target Exascale.
