The POINT project is improving and supporting a parallel performance environment that integrates the widely-used TAU, PAPI, KOJAK, and PerfSuite technologies as core components. Each tool has been enhanced to better support user needs and evolving scalable HPC technology, and to interoperate as part of a performance engineering system that can be used routinely in the performance evaluation and optimization of science and engineering (S&E) applications running on HPC systems of extreme scale.

This performance software foundation is complemented by a community-driven education and training initiative to increase human productivity in performance engineering efforts across multiple S&E fields. The POINT training program for performance technology and engineering is led by the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center and integrated with the TeraGrid Education, Outreach, Training (EOT) mission. The objectives are to educate application developers and students in sound performance evaluation methods, to teach them best practices for engineering high-performance code solutions based on expert tuning strategies, and to train them to use the performance tools effectively.

The POINT project has demonstrated the performance tool suite and performance engineering practice through application engagements with the NAMD, NEMO3D, and ENZO projects. Collaboration with ENZO developers has addressed their needs for getting large AMR problems to fit efficiently on newer multicore architectures. Performance engineering work on the NanoHub server at Purdue University has enabled it to scale to handle large-scale problems (e.g., with NEMO3D) and large numbers of users. Integration of POINT tools with Charm++ has enabled applications supported by that system (e.g., NAMD) to achieve better performance results.