Message from the ProTools 2019 Workshop Chairs

Understanding program behavior is critical to overcome the expected architectural and programming complexities that arise on modern high performance computing (HPC) platforms, such as limited power budgets, heterogeneity, hierarchical memories, shrinking I/O bandwidths, and performance variability. In order to do so, HPC software developers need intuitive tools for debugging, performance measurement, analysis, and tuning of large-scale HPC applications. Moreover, data collected from these tools such as hardware counters, communication traces, and network traffic can be far too large and too complex to be analyzed in a straightforward manner. We need new automatic analysis and visualization approaches to help application developers intuitively understand the multiple, interdependent effects that algorithmic choices have on application correctness or performance. The Workshop on Programming and Performance Visualization Tools (ProTools) intends to bring together HPC application developers, tool developers, and researchers from the visualization, performance, and program analysis fields for an exchange of new approaches to assist developers in analyzing, understanding, and optimizing programs for extreme-scale platforms.