Translating High-Performance Computing Tools From Research to Practice: Experiences With the TAU Performance System

The field of high-performance computing (HPC) has always challenged the research community to design and develop performance observation technology (based on instrumentation, measurement, and analysis methods), keeping pace with the rapid and aggressive evolution of HPC systems’ hardware and software. While the scope of observational concerns is broad and complex, it is the HPC innovation flux that poses difficult translation issues, even for performance tools of limited functionality. Both the complexity of HPC performance observation and the HPC translational pressures have kept the performance tools community mostly research oriented, with only a few open source toolkits widely used. The TAU Performance System is a performance toolkit for HPC with more than 30 years of continuous research and development. This project at the University of Oregon has attempted to keep TAU at the forefront of performance observation capabilities, ported to the latest HPC platforms available, and supported by a dedicated core research team. This article briefly describes the project’s research work and the challenges encountered, with a particular emphasis on the translation process necessary to make TAU the leading performance technology it is today.