Dalton is a molecular electronic structure program featuring common methods of computational chemistry that are based on pure quantum mechanics (QM) as well as hybrid quantum mechanics/molecular mechanics (QM/MM). It is specialized and has a leading position in calculation of molecular properties with a large world-wide user community (over 2000 licenses issued). In this paper, we present a characterization and performance optimization of Dalton that increases the scalability and parallel efficiency of the application. We also propose asolution that helps to avoid the master/worker design of Daltonto become a performance bottleneck for larger process numbers and increase the parallel efficiency.

The execution of scientific codes will introduce a number of new challenges and intensify some old ones on new high-performance computing infrastructures. Petascale computers are large systems with complex designs using heterogeneous technologies that make the programming and porting of applications difficult, particularly if one wants to use the maximum peak performance of the system. In this paper we present the design and first prototype of a runtime system for parallel numerical simulations on large-scale systems. The proposed runtime system addresses the challenges of performance, scalability, and programmability of large-scale HPC systems. We also present initial results of our prototype implementation using a molecular dynamics application kernel.

Exascale systems will be heterogeneous architectures with multiple levels of concurrency and energy constraints. In such a complex scenario, performance monitoring and runtime systems play a major role to obtain good application performance and scalability. Furthermore, online access to performance data becomes a necessity to decide how to schedule resources and orchestrate computational elements: processes, threads, tasks, etc. We present the Performance Introspection API, an extension of the IPM tool that provides online runtime access to performance data from an application while it runs. We describe its design and implementation and show its overhead on several test benchmarks. We also present a real test case using the Performance Introspection API in conjunction with processor frequency scaling to reduce power consumption.

Understanding how parallel applications behave is crucial for using high-performance computing (HPC) resources efficiently. However, the task of performance analysis is becoming increasingly difficult due to the growing complexity of scientific codes and the size of machines. Even though many tools have been developed over the past years to help in this task, current approaches either only offer an overview of the application discarding temporal information, or they generate huge trace files that are often difficult to handle.

In this paper we propose the use of event flow graphs for monitoring MPI applications, a new and different approach that balances the low overhead of profiling tools with the abundance of information available from tracers. Event flow graphs are captured with very low overhead, require orders of magnitude less storage than standard trace files, and can still recover the full sequence of events in the application. We test this new approach with the NERSC-8/Trinity Benchmark suite and achieve compression ratios up to 119x.