In an interview about the POP (Performance Optimisation and Productivity) Centre of Excellence, Jesús Labarta, director of the Computer Sciences Department at Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) and coordinator of the POP CoE, explains why performance analysis is crucial to getting the most out of computers.

During the interview, Labarta explains that POP’s performance analysis results in performance improvements ranging from 10-15% to more than 10 times. Aimed at both developers and users of applications, as well as infrastructure providers, POP’s services centre around an external assessment of parallel codes. According to Labarta, this external viewpoint allows roadblocks to be identified and leads to more efficient use of valuable computing resources.

POP provides performance optimisation and productivity services for academic and industrial codes in all domains. Coordinated by BSC, the EU-funded Center of Excellence comprises six partners from across Europe who are well known for excellence in performance tools and tuning, excellence in programming models and practices, strong research backgrounds, as well as support for real-life use cases in both academia and industry.

A more in-depth version of this interview will be published in the October issue of the HiPEAC (Network of Experts in High-Performance and Embedded Architecture and Compilation) magazine, HiPEACinfo 52 (page 23).