Editor Bailey (computational research, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory) presents a review of research, theory, and experimentation (current as of summer 2010) in the field of modern performance science and engineering. Because the intent of the book is to introduce real-world users of computer systems to research in performance analysis, material is written to be accessible to a wide range of mathematicians, computer scientists, and application scientists, including physicists, chemists, biologists, environmental scientists, and engineers who actually use performance analysis systems. After an architecture overview, main themes include hardware and software tools for performance monitoring, performance analysis and benchmarking, performance modeling, automatic and semi-automatic performance tuning, and application examples. Annotation ©2011 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
With contributions from some of the most notable experts in the field, Performance Tuning of Scientific Applications presents current research in performance analysis. The book focuses on the following areas.
Performance monitoring: Describes the state of the art in hardware and software tools that are commonly used for monitoring and measuring performance and managing large quantities of data
Performance analysis: Discusses modern approaches to computer performance benchmarking and presents results that offer valuable insight into these studies
Performance modeling: Explains how researchers deduce accurate performance models from raw performance data or from other high-level characteristics of a scientific computation
Automatic performance tuning: Explores ongoing research into automatic and semi-automatic techniques for optimizing computer programs to achieve superior performance on any computer platform
Application tuning: Provides examples that show how the appropriate analysis of performance and some deft changes have resulted in extremely high performance
Performance analysis has grown into a full-fledged, sophisticated field of empirical science. Describing useful research in modern performance science and engineering, this book helps real-world users of parallel computer systems to better understand both the performance vagaries arising in scientific applications and the practical means for improving performance.
Read about the book on HPCwire and insideHPC