Performance analysis techniques for the exascale co-design process

Efficient and effective performance analysis techniques are critical for the development of future generation systems. They are the drivers behind the required co-design process that helps establish the principles needed for their design. In this paper, we will highlight two such approaches: PAVE, a project that investigates mapping of performance data to more intuitive domains and uses advanced visualization techniques to expose problems, and GREMLIN, a system evaluation environment capable of emulating expected properties of exascale architectures on petascale machines. Combined with other approaches in system modeling and simulation, these projects enable us to provide a meaningful introspection into a target application's characteristics as well as its expected behavior and, more importantly, likely bottlenecks on future generation machines.