High-level Visualization of Performance Data

Hi, my name is James Lowe, I am 23 years old and I was born and raised on the north-side of Dublin, Ireland. I have just this summer completed my bachelors degree in Electronic and Communications engineering at the Dublin Institute of Technology. I am taking part in the Summer of HPC in Ostrava Czech Republic at IT4Innovations where I am working on a visualization tool for the performance of data.

Me myself and I

As part of my bachelor degree I was required to partake in a final year project. The project was to simulate the Ising Model of ferromagnetism. This looked at the change of magnetic state of a material with temperature and applied magnetic fields. The model required a HPC solution as simulation times would take far too long on consumer grade PCs. To combat this I built my own Beowulf cluster from old PCs and also applied for time on Ireland’s national supercomputer Fionn with the Irish Center for High End Computing (ICHEC). This was my first introduction to High end Computing and I really enjoyed it! From this, my thesis supervisor Dr. Kevin Berwick recommended that I apply to the SoHPC and here I am today!

The summer of HPC kicked off with a training week in Edinburgh, Scotland. Where David Henty gave a great introduction to Parallel computing using MPI. Edinburgh is a beautiful city and we got to see such sights as Arthur’s seat and the cafe where JK. Rowling wrote Harry Potter and also did a bus tour around the city.

The project I am working on in Ostrava is the visualization of  performance data. There are many tools for measuring performance data such as Scalasca. They allow the programmer to optimize their code by showing the time a given function takes to execute along with other performance metrics. From this it is possible to make alterations to the code and improve its efficiency. However the feedback from the current tools are not intuitive. The aim of this tool is to take the data from these tools and produce a view on the data upon the communication’s model .

Ostrava is a beautiful industrial city with a lot of character. There are many interesting places here that i would like to visit. I had the pleasure of going to see the coal mines which i found interesting. The people at IT4inovations are friendly and welcoming and so far i am thoroughly enjoying my stay here.

Arthur’s seat , Edinburgh

Edinburgh Castle , Edinburgh

Coal Mines , Ostrava

Coal Mines , Ostrava

Ostrava Center , Ostrava