TAU Enterprise: Intuitive Performance Problem Identification and Resolution

The Department of Energy and other federal agencies have made significant investments in high performance software engineering tools, yet these tools still lack advanced problem identification capabilities. At the moment, users must rely heavily on their own experience and intuition to interpret software performance data, identify the root cause of a software performance problem, and ultimately resolve the problem. This limits tool adoption by small companies and independent software vendors, particularly in the manufacturing sector, who lack extensive in-house software engineering experience. How this Problem or Situation is Being Addressed This project is developing a complete “production grade” software performance engineering product that lowers the barriers to entry for novice users and enhances their ability to mine actionable information from software performance data. The new product presents a simple, intuitive, and systematic user interface that guides users through performance engineering workflows and uses advanced cloud-hosted performance analysis services to offer unprecedented data analysis and problem identification and resolution capabilities. SBIR Phase I Activities Phase I will prototype software performance problem identification, classification, and severity prioritization as cloud-hosted performance analysis services. The services will connect to ParaTools’ TAU Commander product to further enhance the market value of this unique software tool. Phase I will also establish ground- work for marketing efforts targeting small and mid-sized manufacturers to sell the data storage, analysis, reporting, and visualization services that have been shown to realize 10-100x speedups in mission critical software applications. Commercial Applications and Other Benefits. The Council on Competitiveness reports that over two-thirds of U.S. industry representatives claim their most demanding HPC applications could utilize a 10x increase in computing capability over the next five years, and over one-third could use a 1000x increase. The affordable performance engineering products developed through this SBIR project will fill a crucial need for improved compute capability utilization by improving software scalability, the most significant limiting factor to achieving a 10-fold improvement in performance.