Performance engineering challenges: the view from RENCI

Trends in chip technology and system design are causing a revolution in high-performance computing. The emergence of multicore processor chips, the construction of very large computing systems, and the increasing need to deal with power and energy issues in these systems are three of the most significant changes. We focus on the way that these trends have created a new set of challenges in the area of performance engineering, the measurement, analysis, and tuning of computing systems and applications. We discuss these changes and outline recent work at the Renaissance Computing Institute to meet these challenges.