This January, POP returned to a less-sunny and still freezing Kraków, Poland, for HiPEAC 2026, and contributed to two different sesions.

During the “From HPC Applications to Systems” session, which was held as part of the "RISC-V: the Cornerstone ISA for the Next Generation of HPC Infrastructures" workshop, Joan Vinyals (BSC) presented insights gained from ten years of POP. The talk focused on the information that analysts need from machine users to obtain the most meaningful and actionable performance assessment. It also emphasised how POP's performance analyses can offer valuable insights for designing the next generation of RISC-V architectures, bridging the gap between application requirements and hardware capabilities.

During the session "Rethinking scientific applications for exascale and emerging architectures: the Centre of Excellence challenge", Sandra Mendez (BSC) presented the application of the POP methodology for the performance analysis of hybrid parallel applications on behalf of the POP3 Centre of Excellence. The presentation focused on how structured performance analysis can provide a precise understanding of application and system behaviour, enabling meaningful and actionable assessments to be carried out. The POP methodology was presented as a systematic workflow involving the identification of application structures, the selection of areas for analysis and the evaluation of hierarchical efficiency metrics.

Real analysis examples were used to illustrate how metrics such as parallel efficiency, load balance, communication efficiency and serialisation can be employed to identify scalability bottlenecks in hybrid MPI+OpenMP applications. The results showed how performance issues can arise from factors such as load imbalance, communication overheads or insufficient parallelisation, and how these can be quantified and interpreted to inform optimisation. The talk also emphasised the POP methodology's applicability across various programming models and its ongoing development for hybrid MPI+GPU environments.