Communications of the ACM
Scaanalyzer: An Award-Winning Tool to Find Computing Bottlenecks
Xu Liu shows off the Best Paper award from Supercomputing 15 as well as the paper that won it, ScaAnalyzer: A Tool to Identify Memory Scalability Bottlenecks in Parallel Programs."
College of William & Mary researchers have developed ScaAnalyzer, a new tool they say could have considerable value to the supercomputing community.
ScaAnalyzer can find elusive bugs in software and enable computers to run faster and more efficiently. The tool is designed to address scalability problems, which can prevent applications from expanding and taking advantage of the increased computing potential of a multi-core system. The researchers say the tool takes aim at a computer's memory subsystem and can help pinpoint trouble areas in both software and hardware.
"The hardware designers can design different memory layers. A layer might have different features like size, speed, bandwidth," says William & Mary computer scientist Xu Liu, who developed the tool with Bo Wu, who is now a member of the faculty at the Colorado School of Mines. "We can give this feedback to the hardware vendors, and tell them, 'Maybe you should focus on this memory layer.'"
Liu and Wu's paper on the tool was named Best Paper at the Supercomputing '15 conference. They plan to make ScaAnalyzer available for free as an open source utility.
From College of William & Mary
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