Developers of applications that require the use of High Performance Computing (HPC) can count now on free advice of European experts to analyze the performance of their codes. The Performance Optimization and Productivity (POP) Centre of Excellence, supported by the European Commission under H2020, starts operating today. POP is coordinated by the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) and led by the director of BSC’s Computer Sciences Department, Prof. Jesús Labarta.

The POP Centre of Excellence gathers experts from BSC, the German Supercomputing centers in Jülich and Stuttgart, the Technical University of Aachen, the British center of numerical services NAG and the French center of competence for numerical simulation Ter@tec.

The objective of POP is to provide performance measurement and analysis services to the industrial and academic HPC community, help them to better understand the performance behaviour of their codes and suggest improvements to increase their efficiency. Training and user education regarding application tuning is also provided.

POP is one of the eight Centres of Excellence in HPC that have been promoted by the European Commission to foster the use of HPC technologies in science and engineering within Horizon 2020.