Following the success of our first training, POP CoE organized the 2nd series of performance analysis and tuning workshops with all-female trainers. This workshop was held from 17th to 19th May 2022 in collaboration with VI-HPS. Marta Garcia-Gasulla (Barcelona Supercomputing Center) and Radita Liem (RWTH Aachen University) were the main organizers of the workshop.
Workshop Format
This workshop targets students, researchers, and professionals who want to gain skills to analyze code performance for their work. To achieve these, the topics that we covered were:
- Overview of the POP methodology and how to apply it in the analysis
- Performance tools used in POP and VI-HPS: Score-P, Scalasca, Cube, Vampir PAPI, Extrae, Paraver, and Dimemas
- Hands-on program on the applications brought by participants or the toy program provided by the trainers.
Once again, we used the online format with Zoom and Slack which is proven to be successful to reach more diverse participants in our workshop. The session for each day was always divided into lectures on the tools/methodology and followed by a hands-on session after the lunch break guided by the trainers.
The scope of the workshop is limited to the MPI program due to the test platform and time constraints. However, the trainers also accepted questions and provided help on the topics related to the GPU and other programming paradigms.
Participants
Around 20 people attend the workshop daily (including trainers) and 75% of the attendees are female. This outcome meets our goal to bring in more women to participate and this workshop is considered a well-received workshop within VI-HPS due to the relatively high number of participants.
With this demography, the workshop also has achieved its target audience. Our aim to create a more comfortable environment for women and the underrepresented group is also fulfilled in this workshop which has a high number of female participants compared to the regular VI-HPS workshops.
Outcome and Future Plans
The workshop participants gave favorable reviews for all of the components from the presentation, workshop medium, and trainers' involvement during the practical session.
Learning to use new applications for performance analysis listed as the main reason why the participants registered to the workshop (9 out of 11 respondents of our questionnaire). We also have met this goal as our participants gave us various remarks that the workshop is beneficial for them to learn new skills about profiling tools. We quoted one of the workshop participants said:
“It helped organize my head with the different types of profiling applications and the basic usage of all of them.”
Also the combination of lectures and hands-on sessions were positively reviewed:
“I liked the most the alternating between lectures and hands-on sessions.”
“The hands on sessions were great and all people involved very kind.”
We took it as a praise that several female participants don’t feel the quality is any different compared to the other similar workshops and don’t realize that it is a special series. We hope that this outstanding outcome can act as a way to break the bias in the field and organize more similar workshops in the future.
Training Team
We would like to thank our fantastic training team, without whose contribution running this workshop would not have been possible:
- Marta Garcia-Gasulla (Barcelona Supercomputing Center)
- Judit Gimenez (Barcelona Supercomputing Center)
- Sandra Mendez (Barcelona Supercomputing Center)
- Fouzhan Hosseini (Numerical Algorithms Group)
- Christina Mühlbach (TU Dresden)
- Anke Visser (Jülich Supercomputing Center)
- Radita Liem (RWTH Aachen University)
