Enhancing Productivity in High Performance Computing through Systematic Conditioning

In order to take full advantage of high-end computing platforms, scientific applications often require modifications to source codes, and to their build systems that generate executable files. The ever-increasing emphasis on productivity in HPC makes the efficiency of the build process an extremely important issue. Our work is motivated by the need for a systematic approach to the HPC lifecycle that encompasses build and porting tasks. In this paper we briefly present the design of the Harness Workbench Toolkit (HWT) that addresses the porting issue through a user-assisted conversion process. We briefly describe our adaptation capability model that includes routine conversions (string substitutions) as well as more advanced transformations such as 32-64 bit changes. Next, we show and discuss results of an experiment with a production source code (the CPMD application) that examines the effort of adapting the baseline code (the Linux distribution) to specific high-end machines (IBM SP4, Cray X1E, Cray XT3/4) in terms of the number of necessary conversions. Based on the conversion capability model, we have implemented conversion assistant modules that were used in the experiment. The experimental results are promising and demonstrate that our approach takes a step towards improving the overall productivity of scientific applications on high-end machines.