TAU Commander: An Intuitive Interface for the TAU Performance Analysis System

The TAU Performance System is a powerful and highly versatile profiling and tracing tool ecosystem for performance analysis of parallel programs. Developed over the last 15 years, TAU has evolved with each new generation of HPC systems and scales efficiently to hundreds of thousands of cores on the largest computers in the world. TAUs organic growth has resulted in a loosely coupled potpourri of features and novice users first encountering TAUs complexity can be intimidated or frustrated, particularly since the user interface to TAU is now at a point where it is neither consistent nor unified. ParaTools, Inc. will systemize and simplify TAU usage by developing a unified, intuitive user interface for TAU called TAU Commander. This interface will use an abstract interface to express workflows as a logical series of steps instead of a chain of system-specific commands. By following a systematic yet modular design, TAU Commander will provide an intuitive user interface to all of TAUs features and remove guesswork from the workflow, but without obsolescing existing training materials and expertise. Commercial Applications and Other Benefits: High-end parallel computing is widely regarded as a fundamental technology for future science and engineering discovery in the Federal Government, at the national laboratories, and in industry. The ability to utilize HPC resources effectively will deliver the full potential of these platforms, and parallel performance tools are a key element in the process of application characterization, analysis, and tuning. Ultimately, it is the productivity of the HPC users that matters. A fully developed TAU Commander carried through Phases II and III will reduce the current impediments to TAUs adoption and enable more integration with HPC environments. In doing so, a larger community of TAU users across a greater scope of application domains will emerge.