Case Study: Allinea Tools Introduce Australia’s ‘Awesome’ Future Workforce to Efficient Supercomputing

Snapshot Client: Western Australia’s iVEC is an unincorporated joint venture between Australia’s National Science Agency and four western Australian universities.

Situation: Rebecca Hartman-Baker is inspiring students to become the workforce Western Australia will need for its world-class research projects.

Solution: Throw a profiling party to make code-optimization a fun activity.

Success: Allinea MAP makes profiling code ‘awesome’.

Summary quote: “These students are the cream of the crop – and the Allinea tools will definitely help them to become more competent computational scientists.” — Rebecca Hartman-Baker, iVEC Supercomputing Development and Applications Specialist

Talk to Rebecca Hartman-Baker, and you’ll notice she says ‘awesome’ a lot. In fact, while working at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in Tennessee, a friend gave her a lanyard that said ‘Team Awesome’.

“Everyone coveted my lanyard,” she chuckles.

So she ordered 100 more to reward people who did ‘awesome’ things.

When she moved across the world for an opportunity to help establish a new supercomputing center in Western Australia, the lanyards came too. These days, some are likely finding their way into the hands of students. That’s because teaching and inspiring Western Australia’s up and coming researchers is a big part of her job.

One of the tools she’s teaching students to use is Allinea MAP because of its awesome ease-of-use.

“It’s a great tool to get people comfortable with profiling, diagnosing and fixing problems in their code.”

Why hold a clinic when you can throw a party?Given her proclivity for fun, it isn’t surprising Hartman-Baker called her first user-clinic a ‘profiling party’.

“A ‘clinic’ sounds so unapproachable but a ‘party’ sounds harmless and fun,” she says. “It attracts people to come and give profiling a try.”

Hartman-Baker says it’s important to realize many people are scared to try new tools.

“A lot of them have never taken a computer science class; they picked up programming from their PhD. advisor or other grad students. They don’t care about the computer and they don’t understand that choices they make in their algorithms can make a big difference in performance.”

As it turned out, Allinea MAP is the perfect tool for a party. People can run their code and see results quickly. There’s no steep learning curve to bust the festive vibe.

Rebecca Hartman-Baker and team standing in front of the Pawsey Centre.

Case Study: Allinea Tools Introduce Australia’s ‘Awesome’ Future Workforce to Efficient Supercomputing

Optimizing Code for World’s Largest Radio TelescopeDuring the profiling party, a radio astronomy grad student arrived with code designed to filter and process data from the Murchison Widefield Array, one of three precursor telescopes for the Square Kilometer Array (SKA). The SKA will be the world’s largest radio telescope when in full operation in 2024. Radio telescopes reveal areas of space otherwise obscured or not visible with optical telescopes.

Most of the code’s execution time was spent in a nested loop with six levels. Hartman-Baker showed the student how to experiment with two different loop configurations, using Allinea MAP, and see which gives the optimal performance.

“In one configuration the cache performance looked better, but there were other factors that made the total time spent in the loop longer,” says Hartman-Baker.

Experimenting with a piece of code could be construed as a waste of time, but Allinea MAP’s intuitive GUI and straightforward approach made the experience enjoyable.

“We didn’t have to consult the manual except for clarification about what certain metrics meant,” says Hartman-Baker.

She’s planning to throw another profiling party soon.

“Next time I’ll bring some popcorn,” she jokes.

Making History at SC13Beyond profiling parties, Hartman-Baker will use Allinea MAP for an even more ambitious project.

She’s mounting a team of undergraduate students from iVEC’s partner universities to compete as the first-ever team from Australia in the SC13 student cluster competition.

During the 48-hour event, students assemble a cluster, not to exceed the 26-amp power limit, on the SC13 exhibit floor. They run three set codes and one mystery code to solve as many problems as they can before the time is up.

Allinea is donating licences for both Allinea MAP and its popular Allinea DDT debugger during the run-up and competition.

“With Allinea MAP we’ll be able to quickly profile our codes, figure out the hotspots and optimize to get more work done in the given amount of time,” says Hartman-Baker.

Awesome PotentialIt’s an exciting time for supercomputing in Western Australia.

In 2009, the Australian government committed $80 million, under its Super Science Initiative, to develop the Pawsey Supercomputing Center. The center’s primary purpose is to support high-powered Australian

research, including the SKA program.

Each project will require significant supercomputing resources and skilled researchers. For her part, Hartman-Baker is leading the decision-making process during iVEC’s purchase of a petaflop machine as well as cultivating the talents of up-and-coming researchers.

“That’s why I came here: for the opportunity to work on these projects and for the chance to work with these students,” she says.

She’s starting them off on the right footing. With awesome tools like Allinea MAP and Allinea DDT, they’ll develop the programming habits they need to work at a large scale and make the best of their new supercomputer.

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